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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

#421
post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dropped Dropbox with extreme prejudice (was a paying customer) when they decided to dictate which Linux filesystems I may use. Will never use them ever again. Randomly demanding I drop everything and re-engineer my stack is an invitation for me to re-engineer them out of my life.

> when they decided to dictate which Linux filesystems I may use That’s an odd framing. How about “when they didn’t support the filesystem I use”? If some software is only available on Windows I doubt anyone would say that the vendor is trying to “dictate what OS I use”.

The framing is not odd at all. Your framing makes it sound as if this was some requirement that had been known since the beginning rather than the typical "Good news! For our own corporate reasons we have decided to make your life better by jumping to the top of your todo list and breaking your things!" Thanks, I hate it.

To be clear it is trivial to thwart the check, but shared library shims can't fix the real problem which is pointless corporate contempt. Particularly if I'm paying for it.

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

#424

In case if you want some Evernote alternatives, here's my shortlist: 1. Trilium Notes: https://github.com/zadam/trilium 2. AppFlowy: https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy 3. Affine: https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE 4. Joplin: https://github.com/laurent22/joplin 5. Dendron: https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron (requires VSCode) As a programmer I liked Dendron the most but if you want it to be packed with absol…

Dendron is no longer developed, and in any case is intended for a very different use case than Evernote.

Amplenote might be a better drop-in replacement.

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

#425
> How they intend to do that without any staff is something I would like to know about.

Bending Spoons has a product and engineering team. They may have concluded that they don’t need the staff from Evernote to take the product to the next level.

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

#426

> How they intend to do that without any staff is something I would like to know about. Bending Spoons has a product and engineering team. They may have concluded that they don’t need the staff from Evernote to take the product to the next level.

Seems unrealistic to me. Evernote's backend platform sure has to be pretty substantial (and legacy!) and managing and operating these types of platforms does not seem Bending Spoons' forte.

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

#427

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…

> 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"?

Part of their problem is that they aren’t.

But they should be just text files with pointers to non-text things.

Creating a proprietary format just because is an unnecessary complexity and cost.

I used Evernote for 5-10 years and had thousands of notes. I had maybe 10-20 photographs or diagrams mixed in, but mostly it was text.

Not sure how common my use is, but they kept adding stuff I didn’t want. And it’s now a “free” feature in Apple notes, onenote and countless others.

I think the difference is that Microsoft and Apple are just trying to find efficient ways to store data in their cloud storage. Evernote was trying to find ways to make customers pay for note taking.

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

#429

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 would like to pick your brain about Notion for the reasoning you mentioned. Do you think Notion would be the next Evernote - in both the good and the bad way? Both the services are serving the same segment of the consumer market & both started out with generous offerings for free. I could be wrong how I see it but it would be nice to hear something interesting.

Are they really in the same segment?

Evernote's killer feature was its ability to "scan" paper documents with a smartphone and to be able to search on those documents in the future.

Notion is just a Markdown editor.

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

#430

My use of Evernote has been replaced with two apps a few years ago when they abandoned native apps: 1. https://obsidian.md/ for all the notes. 2. https://archivebox.io/ for almost all webpage clippings.

Can Obsidian record voice notes?
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