Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off • Hacker News Board

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

#481

Post by belthesar » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 4:33 PM UTC

srvmshr wrote: post #205

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 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.

It's hard to say. In a lot of ways, they can address the same market, but from different directions. Evernote is a single-user focused app that extended to collaborative notetaking, Notion is a knowledge base app that can be used by individuals.

The market is different, and Notion has always had a present limitation of how much a free account can get away with, even if it is generous. There's a pretty stark difference in saying "have the whole enchilada for free" at first and then "now we're limiting the devices you can sync to" or "now these other features you had are no longer free", vs. "your usage is always metered, and there is a generous free tier". I do imagine there is some sense in that if the free tier threshold was reduced that would cause some pain, but setting the expectation of "lunch is free, all you can eat" and then pivoting to "lunch is still mostly free but now you have to pay for desert" is going to make anyone mad that they have to pay for dessert now.

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

#482

Post by RDaneel0livaw » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 4:34 PM UTC

eviks wrote: post #467

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…

Sticking to plain text is like living in a cave - possible, but unpleasant. Why would you remove all the formatting and integration niceties of modern tech? > Every device, including ones long gone, and ones not invented yet, can read and edit plain text. So what? Every relevant device can also read and write a bunch of more useful formats

I absolutely love plain text notes. Maybe you could understand that just because you think something is unpleasant and ancient, the rest of the entire human race might not agree? Shocking I know.

I can't stand any formatting whatsoever on my notes. I love plain text because it stays exactly as that: plain text. I don't want my dashes to be turned into spacers, I don't want my asterisks to be turned into lists, etc...

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

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Post by kunjank » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 4:34 PM UTC

Brajeshwar wrote: post #136

vzaliva wrote: post #34

Personal journey: I used to be a heavy user of Evernote, but encountered a bug that the developers were not keen on fixing promptly. It was then that I realized the importance of personal notes surviving beyond companies, apps, and formats. Quickly after, I switched to a collection of plain text files using org-mode markdown and have been happy ever since.

A tad similar story with my experience. “Plain text is a powerful universal tool that is almost zero cost, work across platforms, are light enough to work remotely over poor connections, doesn’t go out of date, and is quick to learn.” https://brajeshwar.com/2022/plain-text/

Did you export the Evernote into plain text?

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

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Post by senttoschool » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 4:37 PM UTC

KennyBlanken wrote: post #434

tempestn wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I would have happily paid them 10 bucks a month in inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars forever if they'd just maintained the apps and kept them up to date. Instead they focused on adding features few people wanted, and then completely rewrote the apps in Electron, resulting in a slow experience that was (and still is, years later) missing multiple core note-taking features, and is increasingly unreliable. I kept…

Electron is the single biggest scourge to end users since Windows ME.

Isn't Notion an Electron app or just a webapp?

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

#485

Post by coffeeling » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 4:49 PM UTC

RDaneel0livaw wrote: post #475

bosie wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because it uses icloud drive. and that syncs poorly and on its own schedule. it would sometimes take a day or so to get a file from my mac studio to my macbook. it is crazy how bad icloud is.

my wife and I share stuff within icloud and we both HATE IT SO MUCH. It's truly mind boggling how bad it is, and continues to be, in 2023. Photos sometimes sync, sometimes they don't. Cool. Sometimes rebooting the phone makes them sync, other times not. Awesome. Sometimes shared notes get updated, other times they don't. Sometimes shared note invitations just never arrive at all, for no discernible reason. Sweet. It…

Switch to Microsoft? OneNote's entire file format is built to enable live collaboration. Their apps may be a bit clunky but they work.

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

#486

Post by nirvdrum » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 4:52 PM UTC

neilv wrote: post #339

prepend wrote: post #332

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?

Either way, it's poisoning the well. It's a shame that many (most?) SaaS applications lack data portability. I get that part of it is it's easier to have a custom schema than adhere to an established file format (or creating a new open format). The cynic in me believes a lot of it is good old-fashioned lock-in or casual indifference to their customers' data.

That's may even be fine for some bits of data. But, for anything I want access to long-term, I just can't trust SaaS start-ups anymore. Very few acquisitions end up with a favorable outcome for the customers. Sometimes the service gets unceremoniously shut down. In other cases the app gets folded in to some other product the parent company owns. In yet others the product suffers as the parent company tries to squeeze what it can from the existing consumer base.

I have no real interest in trying to scrape my data out of a vault so I can recreate it elsewhere. Increasingly, I limit my choices to established players with a history of long-term product support (e.g., Apple or Microsoft, but not Google) or OSS. I'm sure in the short-term I'm missing out on new functionality that could increase my productivity, but I don't like the anxiety of knowing I could lose all my data in an instant and so I don't truly engage with such products. My primary concern is no longer than the company will go out of business but rather that they'll try to shoehorn a growth model that doesn't make sense for the core product so they can then sell and sail off into the sunset.

Obsidian is an interesting case where's it's not an established company and it's not OSS, but they've made it possible for you to ensure long-term access to your data. If needed, there could be an OSS-equivalent of Obsidian to read those files. But, I'm happy to just pay them for a good product. If they were to have a big exit, that's great for them and I don't think I'd be impacted very much.

The trend in software has been a move to walled gardens and there's been strong adoption there, so I don't think my mindset on the topic is a prevailing opinion. But, I have noticed family members and such have grown increasingly tired of service shutdowns from acquisitions. Expensive devices become bricks. Important data goes away. Etc.

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

#487

Post by SUPPORTEDLIAR » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 4:59 PM UTC

ryanjamurphy wrote: post #476

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.

The count depends on if you include the cat: https://obsidian.md/about

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

#488

Post by acdha » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 5:03 PM UTC

fluidcruft wrote: post #295

benhurmarcel wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Like everyone else, they have to decide what they support – their core product pretty heavily depends on known file system semantics – and they gave advanced notice specifically so you didn’t have to “drop everything” if you for some reason cannot have a partition using a supported file system.

Put another way, do you think the combined users of file systems which aren’t supported ext4, xfs, btrfs, or zfs are willing to pay more or would quietly accept the possibility of data loss? I doubt the former is true and have absolute certainty that if there was a bug using an unsupported file system that would result in angry, hyperbolic blog posts saying Dropbox is unsafe and will lose your data.

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

#489

Post by cenriqueortiz » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 5:05 PM UTC

I was a paid user for many, many years. I helped them when they opened the Austin office, and find folks. I liked Evernote. Like 2 years ago I canceled; bugs and the features/functionality didn't justify the cost when apps like Apple Notes (free) just do the trick well-enough. This remind me that I still have content in Evernote that I need to get out (when I tried the 1st time was kind of a pain to do that).

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

#490

Post by sebmellen » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 5:05 PM UTC

RDaneel0livaw wrote: post #477

stevefan1999 wrote: post #252

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…

I've been using StandardNotes for years and been happy with them. Is there a reason I should look elsewhere at these or other alternatives? It's just interested I am not seeing this product mentioned anywhere here!

I am also surprised at how rarely Standard Notes is mentioned.