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

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

#341

Post by SanjayMehta »

yabatopia wrote: post #97
SanjayMehta wrote: post #8

They lost the plot when they suddenly reduced the number of devices for the free tier. There was a time when iCloud wasn't reliable. When that improved, Notes became a simpler free alternative.

They lost the plot when they started selling Evernote-branded socks (and other accessories). No bugs smashing, better search or faster/more reliable sync: flush with VC money, the smart guys at Evernote decided that Evernote-branded socks was what their users really wanted. I still have a few Evernote-branded Moleskine notebooks lying around. They came with a 3 month voucher for Evernote Premium, I think. Anyway, hea…

I can't wrap my head around socks as "merch." How madly visible.

And an Evernote branded physical note has to be some kind of ironical statement. I'd hang on to that as a memento.

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

#342

Post by prepend »

BigBar wrote: post #328
swayson wrote: post #77

Obsidian.md for the win. I used to use evernote way back when they started, was cool software, then they started scaling and added worst search UI I have ever come across. That day, I deleted my account and went markdown with my own storage. Don't see the benefit of why your notes should be controlled by others.

I use Obsidian for quite a few things, but I view Obsidian and Evernote as different apps functionally. I can't email notes into Obsidian. Obsidian doesn't have a web clipper, note reminders, markup tools. I mean sure, I could cover some of that with plug-ins, but at a certain point things become inconvenient. For text-only notes Obsidian is great. For web clips, emailing notes in, multimedia, I just find EN much eas…

> I can't email notes into Obsidian. Obsidian doesn't have a web clipper, note reminders, markup tools. I mean sure, I could cover some of that with plug-ins, but at a certain point things become inconvenient.

I don’t care about any of those features. I care about capturing and organizing ideas that are almost always text.

It’s cool you like EN but I think that market is much smaller and EN was just reaching for super edge cases to please a few users and trying to get “regular” users to pay as well.

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

#343

Post by concinds »

It was only a matter of time.

Great software in the early 2010s, when it had no good competitors. But with the software quality decline, dubious decisions by the last 2 CEOs, and intense competition, it was bound to die when interest rates rose.

I recommend downloading a copy of your account data immediately.

Notion has an easy Evernote importer. Obsidian import is much more convoluted, but can be done. Or you can probably download your notes as .enex and import them into the old Evernote client to use offline.

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

#344

Post by j-bos »

woodardj wrote: post #336

There's lots of discussion here about the pros and cons of Evernote, and a slew of alternatives, but this HN post is the only result online since February (when there was lots of news about a Bending Spoons/Evernote layoff), what's the source for this July update?

Agreed, no disprespect to OP, but where are the confirming sources or figures?

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

#345

Post by prepend »

bighi wrote: post #316
izacus wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed "Let's add subscription and tell the stupid users it'll actually be used to improve their experience!"

Evernote had subscription since the beginning

For the first few years I could ignore the subscription because I didn’t want those features. Then they eventually made the subscription required for really basic things, so I left Evernote.

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

#346

Post by gtirloni »

prepend wrote: post #332
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…

I think it’s an example of trying to charge for things that are low value, and, more importantly, low cost. Storing text files in the cloud is super cheap. And having an app to easily edit those files is super cheap. It was free in the beginning because this is a “classic” software problem where it’s cheap to develop and close to $0 marginal dollars for a user. When Evernote started charging for dumb features and loc…

> Storing text files in the cloud is super cheap. And having an app to easily edit those files is super cheap.

Are Evernote files just plain "text files"?

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

#347

Post by deelly »

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…

> to convert free users to paying users for the same features

Not the same features, worse features. They intentionally abandoned Evernote Classic that was like 3 time faster, not clattered, practically without ads, and with more-more features. I will happily pay Evernote some reasonable price if my experience will be better, not worse..

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

#348

Post by RamblingCTO »

TooManyProjects wrote: post #337
bosie wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On ios you can only do icloud though

I tried using iCloud to sync for a year and went back to Obsidian Sync. I’m not sure exactly what the culprit was, but frequently, I would find my ToDo note (which was used the most) would be stuck and fail to sync for days. Rebooting the stick machine would clear the issue. I was using two Macs and my iPhone at the time.

For me it's fixed by rebooting my mac actually. Had that yesterday for the first time. You can check who's not syncing by checking the "Files" app.

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

#350

Post by Zambyte »

bosie wrote: post #327
DeathArrow wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Obsidian's problem is Sync + Publish costs way too much, esp. when compared with competitors. You can sync for free using Syncthing or OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox free accounts.

On ios you can only do icloud though

It blows my mind that Apple can tell you how you're allowed to copy your plain text files from one of your computers to another one of your computers. If you look at the behavior sans the branding, it would not be hard to label it malware.
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