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Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

nytimes.com

81–90 of 354 posts

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#81
post #78

Most people don't know this, but evernote was created maybe 15 years ago, as a desktop app ( https://lifehacker.com/download-of-the-day-evernote-2-0-wind... ). I used evernote before their version 3, which is the one everyone knows today. Evernote 2 was a brilliant note taking app, the first and best of its kind, and it cost a few dozen bucks, which I gladly paid... Then they shifted to the online version called Ever…

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Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#82
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There probably is but it’s really hard to compete with a company with deep pockets. That’s what I find pretty worrying about these unicorns. They kill a lot of potentially good smaller businesses just by being able to burn a lot of money.

How do they “kill” the competition exactly? I understand they have a lot of money, but what do they do with it that makes it impossible to compete? (Honest question)

It's much easier to develop a product if you don't need to make money for financing the development. Selling is also easier if you can afford marketing budgets and sales people. As long as they are losing money they are basically selling 1 dollar bills for 90 cents. Hard to compete with that.

It's not impossible to compete but just much harder.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#83
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just curious, is it easy to export all the notes to a file, or migrate notes to a different machine without using iCloud?

Not really. You can export notes as a PDF.

drawn notes are vectorized in the notes app, but low res rasters when exported

anyone know a way around this?

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#84
post #68

I remember when someone first showed me evernote with a bunch of hype. And I was like "This is pointless, I can't believe it's a company." I think we can refer to that as the age of 'cloud madness' where anything and everything cloud-related was the new hotness. I think we've forgotten just how strong the buzz-wordiness was around cloud, it was prolific.

I get you but if you go on to the discussion forums for evernote either on their site or reddit you'll find people who have their entire lives at their fingertips thanks to this app and for whom it's vital to their work. They use its IFTTT functionality to an insane degree such that every document they get it's one click on the phone and it's filed.

I'm sure there's a subsection of hard-core users that find it really great. The people I interacted with it were just treating it as a document cloud. For me, I carry my work laptop everywhere when I'm working.... so I don't really need to do much on the phone.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#85
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There probably is but it’s really hard to compete with a company with deep pockets. That’s what I find pretty worrying about these unicorns. They kill a lot of potentially good smaller businesses just by being able to burn a lot of money.

How do they “kill” the competition exactly? I understand they have a lot of money, but what do they do with it that makes it impossible to compete? (Honest question)

I work in an industry that is a bit niche and weird SaaS world.

There are two companies backed by deep pocket investors who are happy to lose money, their products are straight sold at a loss because they desperately need market share gains to hopefully dominate and survive when they finally worry about profits.

Now the company I'm at is doing fine as we're small and such and we haven't lost customers to do the absurdly low cost pricing from the other two companies. But I know of others who have lost customers, nobody can match the pricing, and simply because they don't have the backing they will not survive.

It's very possible the two deep pocket companies won't survive either, but it seems like a fairly destructive pattern to have a market torn up ... when the driving force isn't even creating a stable company / what I would think of as typical market forces that help everyone.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#86
post #41

I'd like to leave Evernote (I moved to Linux, which they don't support, and their web app is insufficient). But for me the killer feature is doing OCR on PDFs and images you post and including it in search. I haven't found that elsewhere. Does anyone else do that?

If you want to DIY tesseract is open source and does decent OCR. You can even train it yourself.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#87
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just curious, is it easy to export all the notes to a file, or migrate notes to a different machine without using iCloud?

Not without third party software it seems. Search for “Notes Exporter”

Thank you.

It appears to be a leitmotif with the apple ecosystem: they try to lure you in and then keep you in by limiting your choices of interoperability.

At some point, this should have a negative overall: the number of users gained vs. the number of users not joining due to fears of being locked in.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#88

Apple's "Notes" application is a well known unreliable piece of shit. Evernote's core functionality is extremely reliable and valuable to a lot of people, including myself. Maybe Apple should buy Evernote.

Notes "just works" for me.

And I have hundreds of notes that I migrated from Evernote.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#89
post #58
post #36

Evernote failed because their product was sub-par. Onenote always provided better organization, better pen input. There were just numerous places in which you could see that man-hours were being placed in the wrong places.

Mentioning OneNote sort of makes another point as well. I expect a lot of Office users have never heard of OneNote. The whole general category that lets people save notes of pieces of the Web for later use just turned out to be not that big a thing for most people. I should be a target for this sort of software and used something else in the same general vein for a few years. But I don't really like everything tied u…

I, like many others, use OneNote for science and engineering purposes. I use it to keep hand-written notes from seminars, calculations, discussions with collaborators, as well as keeping track of every every wafer I've fabricated on. I take my tablet into the cleanroom with me. When I'm repairing a piece of equipment, I take pictures and paste them in my notebook and draw on them where I think a failure has occurred. My daily experimental workflow involves making a new sheet per day, logging my changes to my experimental setup, and pasting matplotlib plots into it. My life as a scientist revolves around onenote. If you go to a conference, you'll see numerous people with their surface pro or surface laptop, surface pen, and a copy of onenote open. Evernote missed the opportunity to make a real tool. They kinda almost did. They sorta grazed by making a real tool. Enough so that I sunk more time than I wish I had into trying to make their software work for me before throwing my hands up and realizing they're completely unserious about what they're making.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#90
Instead of this 'long and winding road' wry style pr, the reality is EN spectacularly screwed up. They had the world at their feet but got in their own way. I still use it because incredibly there isn't anything better i'm aware of (I tried onenote but didn't like it) but for me EN is a case history of the incompetent side of valley hype
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