Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 869 posts

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#281

Post by apple4ever »

benhurmarcel wrote: post #242
ramraj07 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like Dropbox has made the transition just fine. If you’re gonna ask me to pay a tenner a month you better give me what I think is the dollars worth of value. Dropbox did. Evernote did not. At least not for the vast majority of people who barely take some notes on some rare days.

Dropbox never took away anything they gave for free though. In the beginning they handed out extra space like candies, and the accounts that got it at the time still have it.

They did though. You used to have unlimited devices syncing for free, then they took that away and made it 3 unless paid.

It's why I ended up switching to OneDrive. (Which I ended up paying for later.)

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#283

Post by DeathArrow »

julianz wrote: post #7

I wonder how that 100 year guarantee is holding up? https://longnow.org/ideas/evernote-and-the-100-year-data-gua...

>I wonder how that 100 year guarantee is holding up?

I wonder when did such a bold guarantee work in practice?

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#284

Post by villgax »

b112 wrote: post #270
villgax wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is to have goverments use Linux which many do, use libre office suites, sponsor projects that government project's outsourcing companies use. Web interfaces for all services without needing to signup for a third party EULA.

Sadly though, that still doesn't resolve other problems. How many people have gmail addresses? Use Google products, such as Google's VOIP service? How many cars, or home(now) come with such products built in? I guess what I'm getting at is, even if you do your best to purge yourself, and even if you try to purge the government, you're still left dealing with people , and if you email them at gmail, then Google still…

Google just recently updated their ToS for purging accounts that aren't active thereby dropping accounts which were part of free tier.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#285

Post by thathndude »

jsiepkes wrote: post #212
julianz wrote: post #7

I wonder how that 100 year guarantee is holding up? https://longnow.org/ideas/evernote-and-the-100-year-data-gua...

I wonder if this eroding trust with startups and companies will become a real problem for them. I mean by now things like "lifetime subscription" have little meaning coming a commercial entity. Well, I'm off enjoying the last few weeks of my lifetime HBO cheap subscription.

I’ve been delighted with my “lifetime” Plex pass, but I worry the day will soon come when I discover the end of the lifetime.

Marco Arment has occasionally complained about lifetime, one-time Overcast premium subscriptions and how he’d really like to rug pull those. But, to his credit, has no present plans to do so. However, it’s more because he doesn’t want to deal with the backlash, rather than because the right thing to do is honor “lifetime.”

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#286

Post by Kaibeezy »

bakuninsbart wrote: post #202
PhoenixReborn wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Obsidian is a small team (< 5 people IIRC?) and they don't have to monetize as aggressively to make back the money that VCs have funded them with.

I think this is the key issue here. There are a lot of VC funded start ups that have a good product and a solid market fit, but they were never supposed to become 500+ employee companies. If you have a product that works and makes a good profit, and you can maintain it with 10 people and extend it with 5 more, sometimes that just is the company. In this context I think it is important to note that Ycombinator was fou…

If you have a product that works and makes a good profit, and you can maintain it with 10 people and extend it with 5 more, sometimes that just is the company.

Amen. I call this business model “tiny unicorn”. Been riding mine 25 years now.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#287

Post by DeathArrow »

belthesar wrote: post #79

I feel like Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to convert free users to paying users for the same features, something we see in many VC funded software from its era. Once you give something away, it's damn near impossible to take it back, even if you plead your case as honestly as Evernote did. Evernote was great. Honestly, it was worth paying for. But they gave away the farm too early, and folks feel…

> and telling you that if you want to own the sync story that you can, but you can pay to have the cohesive experience on every device

What stops you to sync for free using free Dropbox or OneDrive accounts?

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#288

Post by blacklight »

I know some of the folks at Bending Spoons, and I'm quite confident that they'll manage to get something good out of Evernote - eventually. It's a team of smart folks that so far has managed to get all of their apps right.

I don't think there was an easy/painless way out of this though. Evernote has been agonizing for years, it placed too many wrong bets, its developments had basically stalled for the past 3 years or so. It faced the dilemma of how to appeal its base of power users who wanted tons of powerful features (Feedly/RSS integration, search engine snippets, HTML scraping, IFTTT rules etc.) for free / affordable prices, while developing new features that could also appeal a wider userbase and justify a subscription, all while staying profitable in the process.

It wasn't an easy problem to solve. Me and many others realized it a while ago, and simply moved on to other solutions - from Pocket to save links, to Instapaper to keep an organizing list of scraped content, to Notion for all kind of extra integrations, to open-source solutions like Miniflux, Wallabag or Nextcloud Notes, or even Obsidian.

I wish the best of luck to the new Bending Spoon adventure. I'm sure that something good will come out of it, but it'll probably not be an app that I'll use anymore. Competition in this field today is much fiercer than it was a decade ago when Evernote was the undisputed king.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#289

Post by DeathArrow »

Boss1: let's create a great note taking app

Employee1: creates a great note taking app

Customers: :) :) :)

Boss2: let's milk more money, does anyone have a good idea?

Bean Counter: let's add some useless crap, our customer base will quadruple

Employee1: ads useless crap

Customers: ? ? ?

Boss3: let's milk more money, does anyone have a good idea?

Bean Counter: let's fire Employee1, hire Employee2 for half the wage and rewrite everything in Electron

Employee2: rewrites everything in Electron

Customers: :( :( :(

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#290

Post by bayindirh »

kpw94 wrote: post #173
Brajeshwar wrote: post #138

I like to bring up my personal opinion and realization of owning an open format -- plain-text - content for your life-long textual contents. I was once an Evernote user since its early days and a premium subscriber for many years. I have used many notetaking apps and bought enough of them – iA Writer, ByWord, Bear, SimpleNote, nvAlt fork of Notational Velocity, etc. I have moved to a simpler notetaking and writing ha…

Have you tried Obsidian? 3 days ago one of the obsidian makers posted this: https://twitter.com/kepano/status/1675626836821409792 Key quote: "These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian, but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last." Seems to align with your philosophy

Obsidian's problem is Sync + Publish costs way too much, esp. when compared with competitors.

Notesnook provides almost everything Evernote provides, with encryption, better publishing and syncing.

Notion provides more features, incl. publishing and syncing plus the kitchen sink and its factory, yet it doesn't have offline access.

For sync + publish, I have to pay 1.5x what Dropbox wants for 2TB of storage, or what Trello wants for a year, etc.

It makes no sense, at least for me.

BTW, Evernote's .enex format is just well-defined XML. You can parse and convert it into anything you want. It's a modest superset of Markdown.

Post reply on HN