Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel • Hacker News Board

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#191

Post by jyrkesh » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 6:02 PM UTC

Terretta wrote: post #173

jimmaswell wrote: post #163

Tangentially, what I want in a note/todo app is that the first screen will be a list of categories, like "car" and "shower". Under "car" would be a note I made that says "bring new SD card for dash cam". I'd look in "car" before heading out to the car, and see that note and remember to bring the SD card out to it. I'd habitually check all of these before doing anything, so I didn't keep forgetting things I needed to…

OmniFocus Or really, most any Note/ToDo that has first class support for GTD aka Getting Things Done which leverages the notion of @contexts.

I've been playing around with a similar concept for the last year or so, with contexts like "On the go", "Have / Do not have internet connection", "Access to work intranet", etc., and whether a phone could do a good enough job of determining whether you're in a collection of those contexts.

Thanks for pointing me at OmniFocus, it looks really cool. Unfortunately, I'm an Android/Windows guy, and I doubt the Web version is going to be good enough at contexts for it to be worth it for me... :(

EDIT: Might give this one a try: https://appfluence.com/productivity/priority-matrix-omnifocu...

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#192

Post by acdha » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 6:04 PM UTC

magashna wrote: post #159

tru3_power wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Why would you enter a market where one company publicly has 1B+ valuation? It's Goliath crushing David based on reputation alone.

You’d want to look at the market fundamentals carefully: if that company has high fixed costs and lacks strong customer lock-in, problems with satisfying customer needs, etc., you might reasonably think you could pick up customers with better pricing or support.

A great example is Uber: they’re dominant but they have a ton of debt and neither their customers nor, especially drivers, have a reason to stick with them if the money is better somewhere else. They could conceivably make that up through superior logistics but if you thought you could do better, say in a particular geographic area where you can get drivers who know where anything is, it might be reasonable to compete if the absence of such a huge amount of debt gives you enough leeway to support an app development team and treat your drivers enough better that they’ll favor your clients.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#193

Post by stcredzero » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 6:09 PM UTC

CPLX wrote: post #118

It used to be fantastic. The killer app for me was that it was actually impressively good at searching text in images which at the time felt like magic. Like you could take a picture of a whiteboard or your handwritten notes from a meeting or slide on a screen at a conference and then do a free text search of the keywords in it a few months later and find it. It was also really good at clipping web pages and helping…

But then instead of building on that success the product got worse. Oh well.

Evernote seems to have some sort of "reality distortion field" which is somewhat like Apple's, but somewhat mis-calibrated. (Apple's own "reality distortion field" originated with Steve Jobs, and has been losing its calibration ever since he departed this world.) They have a tendency to start with things which feel "magic" then have them fade into "meh." I've tried Evernote a few times, but it just never stuck. It's in that category of, "It seems like it could be really cool, but for some reason, it isn't."

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#194

Post by duxup » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 6:10 PM UTC

codesushi42 wrote: post #96

StephenCanis wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also opens up the opportunity for a lot of lifestyle businesses. It may, at first, seem like a major downside having a venture backed startup competing directly with you. However, they are likely following an all or nothing strategy and there is a chance they go bust. If they end up closing down or pivoting they have helped to create the market and all their users will be looking for an alternative.

Completely true, Pinboard is a good example in regard to Delicious going bust.

I wish there was a way to know about ... what followed, I was wondering what happened after Delicious just sort of rotted away.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#195

Post by djsumdog » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 6:10 PM UTC

etairaz wrote: 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…

I first used it when it was on Palm's WebOS on the Palm Pre. They very quickly supported a lot of devices, many operating systems that are gone now (WebOS, Windows Mobile, etc.)

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#196

Post by who_what_why » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 6:17 PM UTC

slantaclaus wrote: post #14

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.

Really? I think Notes is far superior to Evernote. Notes was shitty but the newer versions since the past 2 years allowed me to completely remove Evernote.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#197

Post by lemonj » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 6:18 PM UTC

magashna wrote: post #150

CPLX wrote: post #118

It used to be fantastic. The killer app for me was that it was actually impressively good at searching text in images which at the time felt like magic. Like you could take a picture of a whiteboard or your handwritten notes from a meeting or slide on a screen at a conference and then do a free text search of the keywords in it a few months later and find it. It was also really good at clipping web pages and helping…

I'd love that picture text search to come back, sounds like a fantastic feature

An app I’m working on adds this text-in-image search to iOS devices: https://memos.org

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#198

Post by vaishaksuresh » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 6:19 PM UTC

etairaz wrote: 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…

I took all my grad school notes and audio recordings in Evernote. I even paid for additional storage. Then they decided to abandon loyal customers and charge subscription for just syncing additional devices. I've since moved to the notes app. One less subscription for me.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#199

Post by hombre_fatal » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 6:23 PM UTC

tru3_power wrote: post #77

maxxxxx wrote: 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)

For one, they can stay free while your coffers run out and suddenly you are the competitor that charges money while the others don't.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#200

Post by acdha » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 6:27 PM UTC

iamnotacrook wrote: post #98

linuxftw wrote: post #42

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.

People still talk up cloud all the time. Well, when Slack is working, or Gmail isn't having an outage, or traffic's not being routed to China...

This is a common fallacy, usually caused by people either not calculating or excusing downtime for self-hosted systems. A big one is time-to-recover: I’ve seen people disparage cloud options for years and then eat days or even weeks of downtime after the wrong server fails, and attempt to handwave reasons why that shouldn’t count the same as a 15 minute outage which was resolved before most users noticed.

One contributing factor may be the difference between surprise and planned outages: if you know things are going to be down and how the work is progressing, it doesn’t seem as dramatic as an outage of unknown duration.