131–140 of 280 posts
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Meetup.. the promise of meetup was the organizers pay a fee so the members don’t have too. My partner organized one a decade ago. I’m still a member of a couple but now they’re really going after group members with ads and upsells. It still works but has become kind of icky. Bending spoons, the name just sends up red flags as parlor trickery.
I'm pretty sure the name is after the scene in "the matrix" (there is no spoon etc).
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I wonder if that's got lost in translation somewhere. I can understand not having on-call operations teams (an anti-pattern) but not having anyone on call at any time seems unlikely. Unless they mean to say its part of all devs job expectations and not a paid extra.
>but not having anyone on call at any time seems unlikely. Bending Spoons is Milan based and most of Europe has very strong right-to-disconnect laws. It's not really uncommon here to not have anyone on call unless you're some big multinational.
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seems to be less invest, and more buy mature products and find the minimum amount of money and people needed to maintain it, whilst squeezing existing customers (which generally doesn't lead to long-term stategy).
Evernote isn't being "maintained". It's being actively developed with new, useful features and being transformed to a much bigger and powerful tool month by month. Features felt like stuck on it haphazardly are now completely integrated into the tool itself, and everything incl. performance is getting better. I'm no longer actively using Evernote, but I have some shared notebooks there and still use it from time to t…
If you increase your price as substantially as they did, you must improve the software to keep users from just up and quitting. It's not clear they have been successful in this yet, losing market share to other competitors.
That is they aren't actively trying to compete and take in new users, but stem the flow and increase revenue from their existing customer base who find exporting their data hard.
We've seen this before with lotus notes and other software and we will see it again.
People usually mention Evernote when Bending Spoons is brought up, but I also know them as purchasing Meetup (after it was already sort of struggling) and, more recently, entering an agreement to purchase Vimeo (of which I'm a paid user). AOL was already a husk, and has been arguably since they got rid of the triangle logo. It was already owned by a private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, as a subsidiary of Ya…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Evernote isn't being "maintained". It's being actively developed with new, useful features and being transformed to a much bigger and powerful tool month by month. Features felt like stuck on it haphazardly are now completely integrated into the tool itself, and everything incl. performance is getting better. I'm no longer actively using Evernote, but I have some shared notebooks there and still use it from time to t…
In this sense I mean maintain as a business not necessarily as software. E.g pivoting from growth to efficiency in the business sense. If you increase your price as substantially as they did, you must improve the software to keep users from just up and quitting. It's not clear they have been successful in this yet, losing market share to other competitors. That is they aren't actively trying to compete and take in ne…
Considering the features they have added and polished, I can't say they're not trying to add new users. With their pricing strategy, they moved up tiers. They were looking like bargain bin software, but with the new price, they are not. They pulled a Chivas Regal with that move.
They are one of the companies which use AI in a saner way, and inherit a powerful foundation, and they didn't kill any integrations or export options.
The .enex format is still the best export format for these kinds of tools, from my experience.
If you look at their changelogs, you can see that this is not a "let's optimize and extort" operation. They have recreated the tool, and listen user feedback intently.
As I said, I'm not an active Evernote user anymore, so I have no skin in their game. I just want a tool I depended this long to survive in a good shape.
People usually mention Evernote when Bending Spoons is brought up, but I also know them as purchasing Meetup (after it was already sort of struggling) and, more recently, entering an agreement to purchase Vimeo (of which I'm a paid user). AOL was already a husk, and has been arguably since they got rid of the triangle logo. It was already owned by a private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, as a subsidiary of Ya…
It sounds like Bending Spoons is where old tech products go to die? I guess that's private equity for you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
seems to be less invest, and more buy mature products and find the minimum amount of money and people needed to maintain it, whilst squeezing existing customers (which generally doesn't lead to long-term stategy).
Evernote isn't being "maintained". It's being actively developed with new, useful features and being transformed to a much bigger and powerful tool month by month. Features felt like stuck on it haphazardly are now completely integrated into the tool itself, and everything incl. performance is getting better. I'm no longer actively using Evernote, but I have some shared notebooks there and still use it from time to t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Evernote isn't being "maintained". It's being actively developed with new, useful features and being transformed to a much bigger and powerful tool month by month. Features felt like stuck on it haphazardly are now completely integrated into the tool itself, and everything incl. performance is getting better. I'm no longer actively using Evernote, but I have some shared notebooks there and still use it from time to t…
The hard part with any of these turn arounds is convincing users that a product they once used and loved, which they left after it betrayed them or they watched it die, is worth going back to. The “cool factor” is gone, nostalgia plays are weak, and people don’t like being burned twice by the same product.
For me, it's not nostalgia or being afraid of being burned again. It's just I have no real reason to migrate back at this point.