311–320 of 354 posts
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…
Lots of people here mentioned they are looking for Evernote replacements. Here is my experience with this: Joplin[1] seems to be the best in my view. It's cross-platform, has decent sync capabilities, plus a web clipper. I've been using this for a while and have liked it a lot so far. I used Quiver[2] for a while when I used to run macOS, but moved away from it because it was macOS specific. It also had some features…
I haven't even tried half of these apps but I'm tired of looking for the one true note taking app that won't annoy me.
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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…
$100M in annual revenues isn't even much of a stretch. 1.6M knowledge workers paying an average $5 a month for their primary note taking app - apps on every platform: iOS, Android, iPad, Mac, Windows, ChromeOS, Linux, encrypted cloud sync, and integration with other apps - feels like a very plausible reality that gets the company to a $1B valuation.
For $7/m, I could get OneNote plus the entire office suite, and OneDrive.
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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.
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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…
Evernote had a lot of odd tech bits in it, it wasn't just a CRUD app. At one point you could take a picture of a beer bottle and it would OCR the label for you automatically. I'm sympathetic to your argument (since that's how Pinboard competitors have died) but Evernote was a universe of its own.
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.
Subscription is great for the company "selling", might be fine for other companies paying it, but I absolutely despise it as an end-user/private customer and will do everything I can to find an alternative (e.g. with a single-purchase license).
With SaaS, you can simply cancel your subscription. With a single-purchase license though, it's basically money you have flushed down the drain (unless the company is really generous with their refund policy).
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…
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…
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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…
You don't think Microsoft Teams might do the same thing to Slack as Microsoft OneNote did to Evernote?