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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

#291

Post by erikpukinskis »

jwr wrote: post #161
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…

Evernote was a great application, and paying for features was not a problem (at least not for the reasonable ones among us). The problem was the the application kept growing and getting slower, more bloated and ugly. In my case, it got replaced by lower-friction apps which were better designed. Natural selection at work, I'd say.

My problem with it was that I typed things and Evernote would just delete them on sync.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#292

Post by throwawayMUSE »

taberiand wrote: post #247
wbharding wrote: post #243

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…

I haven’t used Evernote to know enough, but at a 10,000 foot level, how trivial is it to scale any CRUD application to millions of customers? Considering scaling up and out, individual users, collaboration (if that’s a feature, I dunno), persistence and durability, i18n, personalization (if that exists in Evernote), and whatever metrics or information it captures about its users that might be sold to third parties.

Isn’t Google Docs CRUD to some extent? Any idea how much it is worth or even how many people support Google Docs?

Anyway, I’m not debating whether Evernote is actually worth whatever is it’s current valuation. I don’t agree with how can something be worth so much because its just CRUD.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#293

Post by bshacklett »

lazyant wrote: post #248
shakkhar wrote: post #220

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 lost all of the notes I took while offline, reading on a plane flight, as soon as I connected to the internet again. I haven't trusted Google Keep since.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#294

Post by dasil003 »

shakkhar wrote: post #220
e40 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Google Keep because I had sync issues with Remember The Milk on Android and wasn't about to continue paying them, but Keep is trash. It's a typical side project from a Googler. It's exactly what it was like when they rolled it out. Maybe a tiny feature here or there was added (I haven't noticed any), but it's a static service that is barely usable.

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.

Yeah until they randomly kill it one day because it’s strategically meaningless.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#295

Post by vageli »

cmroanirgo wrote: post #260
raverbashing wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm torn on this. I think single-purchase licenses work for some things, but they're a hard sell for others. For example, I really, really can't justify paying for a password manager for example. At the same time, monthly subscriptions make sense for some things but don't make sense for others.

It's funny how people can have opposite opinions on what constitutes an essential item. For me, the password manager is at the core of everything I do... And it's the first one I'm willing to pony up money for... Even more than the cost of maintaining my personal domains.

> It's funny how people can have opposite opinions on what constitutes an essential item. For me, the password manager is at the core of everything I do... And it's the first one I'm willing to pony up money for... Even more than the cost of maintaining my personal domains.

I wonder if drilling into the whys of these choices would be useful. Like maybe password management is so crucial and with specific requirements that it makes no sense to pay someone else to take control of it.

I'm personally very willing to pay for smarter people than me to handle problems I have but maybe it's not always the case that they're smarter than me or maybe there is a really ergonomic solution I can retrofit to my needs.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#296

Post by dreamcompiler »

I've been burned by half a dozen note-taking apps/services. They all lost my data or went out of business. (Not Evernote; never tried it because of all the stories about data loss.)

Now I have a subscription to Dropbox and everything goes there. I edit notes with Emacs on my laptop and the builtin text editor in Dropbox on my phone. It's not great, but Dropbox has never lost my data and I don't have time to try yet another program that almost certainly won't sweat the details of how sync should work.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#297

Post by burtonator »

Evernote's failure really motivated me to work on an Open Source alternative:

https://getpolarized.io/

It's slightly different than Evernote and more focused on reading + spaced repetition integration.

The next version I'm working on add support for folders and better three level notes preview.

The one thing I need to add, to enable a full Evernote alternative is the ability to take standalone notes.

Right now they have to be attached to books / PDFs which is a bit limiting.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#298

Post by c-smile »

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…

Just in case: here is the story and photo of whole EverNote 2 development team: https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-...

I did note renderer and editor (HTML, WYSIWYG) for EverNote 2. Later that code became Sciter Engine (https://sciter.com)

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#299

Post by c-smile »

c-smile wrote: post #298
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…

Just in case: here is the story and photo of whole EverNote 2 development team: https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-... I did note renderer and editor (HTML, WYSIWYG) for EverNote 2. Later that code became Sciter Engine ( https://sciter.com )

In fact I am developing Sciter Notes to bring back that handy feel of EverNote.

For now it stores notes only locally but in next version it will be possible to use clouds (DropBox, GoogleDrive, etc.) for sharing and accessing notes from Mobiles and browser. https://notes.sciter.com/2019/06/28/note-sharing-is-coming/ (or to use dedicated server for that (paid option)).

Yet: I am looking for co-founder of the project : https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/project/11572/scitern... - please contact me if someone is interested.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#300

Post by AceJohnny2 »

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…

Turns out the "buy once forever" isn't a sustainable business model.

And business' look for a sustainable business model, because it's literally a question of life and death for them.

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