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Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

nytimes.com

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Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#221

Post by SkyPuncher »

stcredzero wrote: post #193
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 fad…

I've felt the exact same way.

I might be missing something, but it feels like it's trying to solve a problem I don't have. In fact, it feels like a problem that doesn't even exist.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#222

Post by matchagaucho »

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 stopped using Evernote about 5 years ago when routine searches started timing out.

The ability to instantly recall past notes with Elephant-like memory will always be needed, so their core product principle is spot on.

But at $8/10GB per month, I can't help but wonder if Evernote is making some data storage vs retrieval performance trade-offs that impact adoption.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#223

Post by daphneokeefe »

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…

I love Google's Keep for this. It's very simple. Text notes or checklists, organized into major categories (labels). I have a set of shopping lists (grocery, hardware, office supply...), another set of bars and restaurants (by location/neighborhood), checklists for so many activities. Works seamlessly on my MBP and Android phone.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#224

Post by tempestn »

bobthepanda wrote: post #203
colechristensen wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They transitioned that to a paid feature because they had to keep the lights on. Small groups of engineers can do amazing things but in most companies amazing things worth doing run out and staff keeps growing. Salaries need to be paid and diminishing returns start. I have been thinking about the economics of being done with a piece of commercial software. Shut down feature additions, lower the price in regular incre…

The real problem is that everything is focused on becoming a thousands-strong workforce and a valuation of billions. IMO lot of software could be small or medium sized businesses making a small but steady profit. But the whole VC/startup culture has made this fundamentally unsexy.

Hopefully Evernote will manage to 'fail' into that kind of successful business, and continue focusing on their core product.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#225

Post by vbezhenar »

__jal wrote: post #164
achillesheels wrote: post #91

SaaS subscriptions are magical when they work; they provide much needed regularity to cash flow forecasting which assuages investor timidity. However, creating a subscription model doesn’t necessarily mean there is a service that warrants it.

What I hate about the rush to subscriptions is the addition of cloud elements where they are not needed. A great example of this is a little addition I've been using to Mail.app, called MailTags[1]. I've been using it for years, religiously upgrading as I go, because email is my primary communications mode and I had a great workflow built around it. Now it has gone subscription and is storing metadata related to mail…

I had similar problem with 1Password. They wanted to move their model to subscriptions, so I decided to take another look at password managers and migrated to KeePass which turned out to be even better alternative (requires some manual setup, but I don't mind).

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#226

Post by rossdavidh »

bobthepanda wrote: post #203
colechristensen wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They transitioned that to a paid feature because they had to keep the lights on. Small groups of engineers can do amazing things but in most companies amazing things worth doing run out and staff keeps growing. Salaries need to be paid and diminishing returns start. I have been thinking about the economics of being done with a piece of commercial software. Shut down feature additions, lower the price in regular incre…

The real problem is that everything is focused on becoming a thousands-strong workforce and a valuation of billions. IMO lot of software could be small or medium sized businesses making a small but steady profit. But the whole VC/startup culture has made this fundamentally unsexy.

Bingo, right there. Once you have taken X bajillion dollars from a VC, you have to find some way of pretending that you can become worth that valuation (plus some profit for the VC's). Thus, a perfectly valid small-to-medium company becomes a moneypit big company.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#227

Post by tempestn »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #221
stcredzero wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fad…

I've felt the exact same way. I might be missing something, but it feels like it's trying to solve a problem I don't have. In fact, it feels like a problem that doesn't even exist.

It can definitely solve problems that exist. I've been using it near religiously for the past 6-7 years as the home of my GTD system, as well as a general store for archived reference information, and the design of their product fits my needs perfectly. That said, the flexibility in use that's one of its main strengths is also one of its greatest challenges, since it can be very difficult to pick it up and get the most out of it.

If you're interested, this blog post gets into how I use it: https://www.tempestblog.com/2017/08/16/how-i-stay-organized-...

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#228

Post by tempestn »

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…

Although it's not purpose built for this, you can do this fairly well with Evernote itself. These guys describe a system that uses tags like @work @home etc. as part of a larger GTD setup: https://thesecretweapon.org/. (My own setup was originally based on their suggestions, and I've found it very handy over the years.)

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#229

Post by tempestn »

dirtyaura wrote: post #214
whack wrote: post #165

The main problem with Evernote seems to be that their total-available-market is way too small to justify their valuation and expenses. It's core success is as a note-taking app - how big is the market for that really? They are competing against free alternatives like Emacs-org-mode, Apple Notes, and Google Keep. Sure, they can carve out a niche for themselves as a premium multi-device cloud-based no-ads app. But a $1…

Why wouldn’t ”note taking on steroids” be worth $1B? It is useful for any information work, and most of the higher income jobs are essentially or at least partly information work. And if they are currently making close to $100M in annual revenues, then $1B valuation doesn’t seem far off. Lock-in effect is quite substantial after you have a couple of years of tagged information. As a user, I just wish they would have…

Absolutely agreed. Note taking done really well would be useful to almost everyone, and they could absolutely dominate that market just as Slack has for chat. IMO if they'd just kept focused on their core app, they could be that right now. Instead focus was diverted in myriad directions, and quality of the core experience suffered. I sincerely hope they manage to 'fail' into a stable company that manages to get bugs under control and then to focus on their core product.

My shorter term hope is that they fix the android app bug that cropped up a couple weeks ago, making notes take 10-30s to open...

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#230

Post by tempestn »

_JasonE wrote: post #63

My wife and I tried using Evernote for keeping a running shopping list. Our options were: You can copy the shared note, but only that most recent version. Or, you can keep it as is but always have to navigate to the "work chat" and click on the note there (no way to add a shared note to your notes without copying it).

No affiliation, but fwiw we find Our Groceries to be a simple, effective purpose-built app for that.
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