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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

#381

I moved to Standard Notes a while ago. I like free things for basic things like notes, but was happy to pay for E2E Encryption to support what they were up to. I think I got a 5 year licence for $150 which was not outrageous. I just looked up their current prices - $80 a year which means I'll migrate back to Joplin soon.

I guess their target market are people that really never want to worry about their notes being leaked, and are willing to pay a premium for that.

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

#382
All commercial software is rented. It's already been created and the marginal cost is Zero. You are ostensibly paying for bug fixes and new development, which is at least partly true in many cases. SaaS at least admits a rental model.

Free Software is rent-free, but development may be slow.

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

#383
post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"?

No. But I’ve pretty much always come back to storing text files, photos, and PDFs. It may not be as elegant a solution but it’s completely portable. Never got into OneNote when I used to use Windows for the same reason.

I've been burned by 3rd party formats - never again - plain text for me.

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

#384
For anyone that used Evernote as a "Document Storage" app instead of just purely notes, I found Notebooks, https://www.notebooksapp.com/, https://www.notebooksapp.com/ to be a good replacement.

It works with files on your harddrive and your existing cloud storage (icloud / dropbox.) macOS/iOS only, but for someone who primarily is storing PDFs this was a much better fit than more alternates that are for taking notes.

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

#385

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.

Have Obsidian taken on any VC funding?

They've intentionally avoided taking on any.

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

#386

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 took away my "free" many years back. I mainly got the space hosting events at my university and other free work I performed for the company around that time as well as many, many referrals.

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

#387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to convert free users to paying users for the same features I don't think so. They had plenty of paying customers. They claimed to be profitable for a long time (eg https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/evernote-rai... ). They had trouble with (i) implementing big price hikes, and (ii) a poor, bug-filled user experience. While that was going on, they were…

If you're on Windows, OneNote is almost impossible to compete with. Even though it's part of the Office suite, it's a free, stand-alone download. The phone apps are free, and you get 5GB of free storage. Then, for less than the cost of Evernote, you can get a O365 subscription and get the Office suite and 1TB of storage. Even though OneNote is basically a loss-leader, it's extremely powerful and flexible. It's been a…

I only wish Microsoft showed it some actual love. The app's been languishing for years, and most any new feature is in the vein of "you can embed TikToks now" or something only applicable to a classroom setting.

That, and while I love that their apps are native, there are serious consistency issues with eg. how search behaves, and the resurrected Windows app still not using the modern sync backend mobile, web and macOS do.

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

#388
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I think Evernote’s problem is that it should have just stayed a 1-2 person company. For the owners/shareholders of that particular 1-2 person company, do they wish it had stayed one, or are they glad it didn't?

Good question which can only be answered by them. But given the amount of money they raised compared to their likely acquisition price (bending spoons has only raise slightly more capital to buy all the apps they are buying than evernote did for its development), I don't think they've walked away with much financially.

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

#389
Sorry for the staff who’ve lost their jobs. I did a phone screen with one of their recruiters a couple years back. They told me they couldn’t afford my (slightly above market rate) salary, but went on and on about how the company enjoyed a very “comfortable” work life balance. WLB is great, but I’ve never had a recruiter spend so much time on that and so little on the “exciting” product/role. That was a red flag to me at the time.

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

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're on Windows, OneNote is almost impossible to compete with. Even though it's part of the Office suite, it's a free, stand-alone download. The phone apps are free, and you get 5GB of free storage. Then, for less than the cost of Evernote, you can get a O365 subscription and get the Office suite and 1TB of storage. Even though OneNote is basically a loss-leader, it's extremely powerful and flexible. It's been a…

Maybe I have simple needs, but iOS notes does everything I want. 1. Instantly synced between all computers and devices (yes I know I need to be in the Mac/iPhone ecosystem, but I happen to be in that anyway) 2. Create folders 3. Paste images 4. Fonts/bullets etc. Apparently that's all I need. Anything else is a hindrance.

If they would just improve search it would be really great. There is no way to restrict search to a folder, for example.
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