[deleted]
Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
81–90 of 354 posts
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#82I loved Evernote and was a paying subscriber right up until they changed their TOS to let their employees read all my notes to work on ad targeting. They backpedaled after a while but trust was lost, I cancelled immediately. I have no sympathy for their failure.
I paid off and on through the years but for me it was when they started selling physical products and advertising them in the app. I can't remember what they were. T-shirts? Mousepads?
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#83I use paper & pencil. Works fine :D
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#84The only reason I've stuck with Evernote is because it scans all of my old paperwork and lets me search by the OCRed text. Without it, so many years of personal data would be locked in images I'd never have time to eyeball. Please someone release me from this foul daemon by suggesting an alternative with this key feature.
If you port over those images to Apple photos, you can literally search the for the text right inside the photos app. It works pretty accurately for all printed text ime.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#85I learned three things watching EN snatch defeat from the jaws of victory: 1) There is almost never a case for a total ground up rewrite of your core product. Just don’t do it. 2) Don’t abandon the users who made you successful in the first place. They’re the ones who advocate for you and get your foot in the door. 3) real time google docs style collaborative editing is table stakes for this software category. Build…
Regarding #1, this is now an often touted recommendation, even by folks like Joel Spolsky whom I greatly admire, but I'm not sure it's the right lesson. For example, I know that Google (at least in the 00s) rewrote huge, major pieces of their infrastructure multiple times and did so successfully. While I agree that broadcasting out a message of "We're going to stop the world and add no new features until we do a ground-up rewrite" is a bad idea, perhaps other lessons could be:
1. Don't write code that's such a spaghetti mess in the first place that you feel the need to throw your hands up and say "nothing can be done except a rewrite".
2. If you do need to do a major rewrite, make sure you have the ability to staff two teams - one doing the rewrite and another maintaining and adding new features to the existing product.
3. Kinda related to number one, but if you have well-organized code to begin with I find it's much easier to do a major rewrite in "sections" (though there are obviously difficulties with this approach).
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#86I learned three things watching EN snatch defeat from the jaws of victory: 1) There is almost never a case for a total ground up rewrite of your core product. Just don’t do it. 2) Don’t abandon the users who made you successful in the first place. They’re the ones who advocate for you and get your foot in the door. 3) real time google docs style collaborative editing is table stakes for this software category. Build…
Disagree on #3. Social & collaborative features are the bane of my existence. No I don't want to share all my scraps of information, no I don't want to let my friends know what I'm listening to, no, I don't want to publish product purchases I make to twitter. I think a better #3 would be: decide whether your audience is individuals or businesses, then build for that.
I agree and disagree. I agree with you because I think they ruined a perfectly good product by trying to turn it into a "collaboration tool" that they could sell big corporate contracts for. On the other hand, I think collaborative editing could have been integrated seamlessly into the product without ruining or even changing the single-player experience.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#87This is going to be a disaster - Bending Spoons is not a good actor: “let’s talk about Bending Spoons’ business model. The basic concept is very simple: - Find a solid app that someone else built and buy it from them (see Splice (acquired from GoPro) and 30 Day Fitness) - Optimize the monetization of said app (by implementing from scratch or fine-tuning existing subscriptions), thereby driving higher lifetime value (…
The really key bit is right afterwards:
“There is absolutely nothing wrong with this business model… What differentiates Bending Spoons, though, is how they do it.
Remini - Bending Spoons’ new app that the press is gushing over - is $10 a WEEK. And Splice, the app that started it all? That’ll set you back a cool $5/week.”
In short, they buy apps, add aggressive and practically exploitative monetization, and ride the revenue stream until it dries up.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#88I learned three things watching EN snatch defeat from the jaws of victory: 1) There is almost never a case for a total ground up rewrite of your core product. Just don’t do it. 2) Don’t abandon the users who made you successful in the first place. They’re the ones who advocate for you and get your foot in the door. 3) real time google docs style collaborative editing is table stakes for this software category. Build…
Regarding #1, this is now an often touted recommendation, even by folks like Joel Spolsky whom I greatly admire, but I'm not sure it's the right lesson. For example, I know that Google (at least in the 00s) rewrote huge, major pieces of their infrastructure multiple times and did so successfully. While I agree that broadcasting out a message of "We're going to stop the world and add no new features until we do a grou…
> rewrote huge, major pieces of their infrastructure multiple times and did so successfully
I think that's different from a user facing rewrite. I suspect while Google did its infrastructure rewrites, users didn't notice a difference. Additionally, Google probably had the resources to continue delivering features to users while the infrastructure was being developed.
The problem with a front end rewrite is (a) things might break and users will notice, and (b) it's hard to deliver new features to users while the front end app itself is being rewritten.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same. It was ahead of its time and incredibly useful, then behind its time and useful, and now antiquated but still full of my important notes. Do I have a loyalty club membership at that one hotel I stayed in halfway around the world 15 years ago, when I had a different email address? Evernote is the only place I can find out. As soon as there’s a dead simple migration path to OneNote, I’ll have $50/year more spendi…
Though basically the same lock-in issue is what kept me from starting to put all my notes into OneNote years ago. Admittedly at this point, OneNote is presumably not going anywhere. But I still make the tradeoff to mostly keep notes in text files.
Reminds me of Derek Sivers how he keeps all his writing in plain text, always, everywhere.
https://sive.rs/plaintext
Edit: Apparently he posted this on HN 8 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30521545
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#90This is going to be a disaster - Bending Spoons is not a good actor: “let’s talk about Bending Spoons’ business model. The basic concept is very simple: - Find a solid app that someone else built and buy it from them (see Splice (acquired from GoPro) and 30 Day Fitness) - Optimize the monetization of said app (by implementing from scratch or fine-tuning existing subscriptions), thereby driving higher lifetime value (…
I must admit it's not entirely obvious why that business model makes them "not a good actor".
And what's with the snark about Italian banks?