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Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

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Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#231

Post by johnxie »

jef_leppard wrote: post #35

I 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…

Agreed on point 3 for modern editors in 2022, as real-time collaboration and collaborative editing are table stakes today if you want to compete. But to give EN credit, when they launched (web 2008?) this was not the case, and a complete rewrite on point 1 could very well be necessary when the new CEO took over recently.

We started with OT [1] in mind for V1 of Taskade [2] with the intention to make our editor collaborative, but it was still a bumpy road before we were able to iterate on the product and speed up our dev cycle,. It continues to be a challenge to support the various use cases and customers, as improvements for offline editing, cross-device syncing, and recovery never ends.

This problem isn't fully solved and there are no perfect out of box solutions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation

[2] https://www.taskade.com

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#232

Post by jdshaffer »

I had enjoyed and even paid for Evernote for several years, until their "restructuring" and they dropped the export of everything but "Evernote Database"... I think they have since restored an export to HTML, but that always was the biggest problem for me... I want to be able to export (and backup) my notes in TXT or MD, not just HTML or their proprietary format.

No idea if they've since added in more reasonable export features, but it was a dealbreaker for me (a big plain-text fan).

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#233

Post by gombosg »

svnt wrote: post #198
paxys wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of what you wrote makes them sound like a "bad actor". All of these are good things for a failing business. Why shouldn't a photo editing app be $10/week? If you don't think you are getting that much value out of it then don't subscribe. Yet there is probably a group of power users who will gladly pay that amount. Evernote needs to be catering to them, not the millions of users who will endlessly complain but ne…

They are the abuser that benefits from the lock-in. Evernote has gradually made it harder and harder to export (50 notes per try, not everything makes it out) and now they exit to these guys. It’s the worst of the post-VC models. Seems like they have been positioning for this for a while.

Ahh, good to know. I jumped ship with a full ENEX export to Joplin about 4 years ago. Haven't looked back since then, although my needs are simple, not power user-like.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#234

Post by lioeters »

boole1854 wrote: post #90
offtotheraces wrote: post #65

This 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?

From September 2022:

> Italian app developer Bending Spoons has raised more than 340 million euros ($327 million) from investors including Hollywood actor Ryan Reynolds and Kerry Trainor, the former CEO of video streaming platform Vimeo.

> Bending Spoons, whose apps include popular video editing tool Splice and Remini, an image editor based on artificial intelligence technology, said the money could be used for acquisitions.

> A source close to the company said former Google Executive Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt was among the investors. Other backers included Italian banks Intesa Sanpaolo and Banco BPM.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#235

Post by rusl1 »

gertrunde wrote: post #92

I was a bit like "Bending Spoons? Who?", so I followed the link to their website and looked at the products page... Then vast amounts of scrolling down that giant page of marketing fluff looking for anything resembling useful information. Then the tab got closed as "Meh. Not for me then." Why must they make these pages pretend to be some sort of glossy coffee table magazine?

That's literally their business strategy, total bullshits. It's all fluff

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#236

Post by pyrophane »

Bit late to the thread. This is a hbit of a shame but also quite clarifying.

I had been holding on to EN as there is no app that does quite what it does quite as well. I liked being able to mix notes, to-dos, captured images, web content, etc, and organize it into folders. The fact that they are working towards a Linux client helped, as well.

What I didn't like was their prioritizing of features that were aimed at enterprise customers at the expense of everything else. The world didn't really need another collaborative text editor for teams with chat, and I never saw EN being anyone's choice for that.

It is a shame. Seems like yet another company that could have made a nice living for its employees by servicing their natural customer base but was instead destroyed by the ambitions imposed on them by their investors.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#237

Post by jdshaffer »

ben1040 wrote: post #19
nathias wrote: post #3

evernote was one of the programs that trapped me, it took some effort to finally migrate my data (I'm now using md files/ obsidian for mobile frontend synced with syncthing)

I had a great workflow going on with Evernote and my ScanSnap. I'd scan mail and paperwork right away, and it'd be full text searchable in Evernote. Maybe once a week or so I'd go through the latest uploads and tag them or put them in folders. It took me a while to figure out an alternative for this because so many of the note tools I had seen were focused on just written notes and not the PDF file use case. I tried…

I'm curious why you moves from ScanSnap (which I use) to a Fujitsu. Just time for an upgrade, or do you prefer some newer feature(s)?

I use my ScanSnap with OCR turned on and haven't had any problems, but I'm always looking for what will replace it when it finally died (still going strong at about 10 years or so, I think!).

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#238

Post by azinman2 »

pyrophane wrote: post #236

Bit late to the thread. This is a hbit of a shame but also quite clarifying. I had been holding on to EN as there is no app that does quite what it does quite as well. I liked being able to mix notes, to-dos, captured images, web content, etc, and organize it into folders. The fact that they are working towards a Linux client helped, as well. What I didn't like was their prioritizing of features that were aimed at en…

They took a bunch of VC cash. Like a lot. They’re going to want 10-1000x on that, and consumers are only willing to pay so much. Apple Notes and Google Keep sucked away most of the consumer market.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#239

Post by jmathai »

awill wrote: post #125

They must be incredibly jealous of all the successful note taking apps (Notion, Ulysses, Bear, Craft). Evernote were first, and blew it. No other way to describe it. I dumped Evernote when they restricted their free accounts to 2 devices. Ironically I'm now paying for Ulysses, money I might have give to Evernote had they not been so awful to early adopters.

Evernote has been in business (albiet, not growing) for 22 years!

I think we need to fast forward 10 more years to see how Notion is doing to make the comparison.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#240

Post by PhasmaFelis »

codalan wrote: post #223
bayindirh wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m talking about their current iteration and roadmap so far. Previous iteration had its fair share of issues, I concur.

The previous issues were bad enough for me to drop Evernote as a paying customer. I would get notes that would not sync correctly, forcing me to resolve it by hand. Even after doing that, it would still have sync conflicts. This was core functionality that just didn't work. During this time, they were busy jamming in features I definitely didn't want or need. Every release would be a slower, buggier version of its pr…

I really, really want to know what kind of person sees a pair of socks with a productivity app logo on them and thinks "I need these in my life."
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