Live data from Hacker News

Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

nytimes.com

261–270 of 354 posts

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#261
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple's "Notes" application is a well known unreliable piece of shit. Since the big update a couple of versions ago Apple Notes is one of the better note apps. Syncing works great, and it has been far more reliable than any of my forays into Evernote.

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

In the “classic” (non-iCloud, add an account via System Preferences → Internet Accounts) mode Notes.app does store notes on your e-mail server via IMAP.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#262
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

IIRC pinboard actually ended up buying delicious

@idlewords can tell you about it.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#263
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s nearly useless. It embeds a screenshot of the page into a note. I don’t think anyone who works on OneNote has used a real web clipper before. Certainly not one as good as Evernote’s is.

There's an actual "Article" mode which cleans up the text and puts text in onenote (and not screenshot). Disclaimer: Ex-MSFT/onenote engineer.

Ah, you know I just noticed that a couple of weeks ago. Alas, I use it only for work, and it still doesn’t work due to a OneDrive limit (can’t fetch my list of notebooks).

It’s still not as useful as the Evernote clipper, but it’s not as awful as I said it was.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

home of my GTD system

That may be why. Lots of people don't have a GTD system. I, personally, can't see myself ever using one.

Maybe I'm just way too low in conscientiousness but I find systems like that so oppressive that I get very unhappy and abandon them.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Google Keep every day. These are my requirements from my note taking app: - simple plain text note-taking; - available on android, iOS and web; - available offline and syncs (more or less) reliably; - full text search. I do not want more features on my note-taking app. I do not want it to go on steroid. Google Keep is not trash. It is perfect for the intended audience. You are just not part of that audience.

Google Keep updated itself and deleted all my data, everywhere, just saying.

I find Google docs to be so clunky and slow.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#266

The Evernote detractors camp has grown to epic proportions in the past year, which is warranted, but I strongly disagree with the contingent of detractors who claim that Evernote's downfall was having the audacity to raise their prices, or limit the scope of their free version. So many of the customer rants I read are focused on this aspect, and it misses the point. Good products are entitled to charge a price for th…

What confuses me about products like Evernote and other CRUD services is - it's just a notebook app. How is it truly worthy of the army of coders, or the millions or billions in valuation that similar CRUD acquires? It feels like there is a tendency of projects like this to grow too far, too fast, until they fail - dollar signs in their eyes obscuring a reasonable vision of their scale and potential, which is far mor…

In this case Evernote is far more than just CRUD and you can see that by comparing it to the CRUD self-hosted alternatives which exist and have sub-par syncing, editing, organization, and indexing. For all it's flaws, which caused them to lose me as a customer, it's definitely more complex than it appears at first glance.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#267
Evernote is a great case study in lack of (or very poor) product management. They even have "The five percent problem" attributed to them. Their product lost any semblance of focus. What they sell obviously has _some_ value, or they'd be gone. But by making their software not particularly good at anything, they made it really hard to love.

Evernote lost me almost ten years ago. They somehow managed to lose about half of my data. Devices would sync and have merge conflicts, even when none of those files had updated (leading to an explosion of notes that were just duplicates). Search never seemed to produce relevant results. Google Keep came out and solved at least my most immediate needs, and I never went back.

At the end, I remember having real trouble trying to find features that I knew existed. The UI would change and I'd be lost. They had an explosion of features (like Office pre-ribbon) and nobody knew enough to (or had authority to) put their foot down and fix it. It's a real shame, but underscores the need for a smart product org and talented designers.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#268
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…

99% of the population don't take notes with a fancy paid for application. In fact most people don't take notes at all.

Out of those that do there are perfectly good things like paper notepads that are fit for purpose. Then there is Notepad.exe in Windows that actually does it for some. I have met someone at the other extreme, using git and 'vi' for notes including 'must buy milk' type of things.

To most people who have some system - bookmarks in the browser, a paper notebook, emails to themselves or whatever, there is no seeking out of the superior Evernote solution. Or even OneNote. I used to work with a guy who was teased for using OneNote and wanting the company to pay for his special program (when there was a perfectly good stationary cupboard).

It is just a hard sell. And now people can just take pictures on their phones it is an even harder sell.

Some things are table stakes with an operating system. A clock. A calculator. A means of taking a screen shot. A web browser. An image viewer. A document viewer. But once upon a time people tried to make people pay for these things. As it turned out nobody needed the MS-DOS TSR calculator with as many memory stores as hotkeys. Evernote is a bit like that in that it has features most but not all don't want to pay for.

We probably would never have heard of them had they not taken the VC money and rammed the product down our throats with the marketing budget. To some extent it is a remnant of a product that never was going to happen - the handwriting input. This had been the dream in the 80's, 90's and 00's. Palm, Apple, Microsoft and everyone else with a dog in the game wanted it to happen. But it never did.

Note taking and search should be an operating system level thing. And it kind of is already.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#269
In have 12k notes (stuck) in Evernote. Every now and then I look for alternatives and come across products like Notion [0], Bear, Apple Notes, Emacs+Org, Notability, and many more.

All of these tools have their strengths and use-cases. But none of them has the power of Evernote (API that lets me access my notes via Python, boolean search, ocr search, saved searches, folders and tags that I can jump to, local copy of my notes on my Mac). But Evernote is old. I would love to use markdown in my notes (see BearApp!), more flexible and nested folders (see Bear or Notion). Also my gut feeling tells me that this company won’t exist in a few years from now. So I need to move on someday.

There are a few companies that shouldn’t have pitched VCs that expect billion dollar valuations. Evernote is one of those companies. Soundcloud is another.

[0] Notion: too slow, does not keep a local copy of my notes, search is not comparable to Evernote‘s search capabilities)

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#270
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

I am pretty sure Google Drive does this as well.
Post reply on HN