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Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

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141–150 of 354 posts

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#141
post #4

paywall

Delete NYT cookie, refresh page. In Chrome and Firefox this is available in just a few clicks by clicking the area immediately to the left of the URL.

Firefox's "Containers On The Go" addon lets you spin up disposable tab containers (see "Multi-Account Containers") with a single click. This works wonders for sites with limited free reads; it's increasingly the only way Medium is browsable for me.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#142

Instead of this 'long and winding road' wry style pr, the reality is EN spectacularly screwed up. They had the world at their feet but got in their own way. I still use it because incredibly there isn't anything better i'm aware of (I tried onenote but didn't like it) but for me EN is a case history of the incompetent side of valley hype

> there isn't anything better i'm aware of I've been enjoying Joplin[1] very much. I could criticize a few things about it, but it does have a web clipper (which was Evernote's killer feature for me), and supports cross-device sync. It even has a decent mobile client (I use it on iOS, I won't speak for the Android one), as well as a CLI (also haven't used it). 1 - https://github.com/laurent22/joplin

thanks, I'll explore using Joplin

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#143
post #118

It used to be fantastic. The killer app for me was that it was actually impressively good at searching text in images which at the time felt like magic. Like you could take a picture of a whiteboard or your handwritten notes from a meeting or slide on a screen at a conference and then do a free text search of the keywords in it a few months later and find it. It was also really good at clipping web pages and helping…

They transitioned that to a paid feature because they had to keep the lights on.

Small groups of engineers can do amazing things but in most companies amazing things worth doing run out and staff keeps growing. Salaries need to be paid and diminishing returns start.

I have been thinking about the economics of being done with a piece of commercial software. Shut down feature additions, lower the price in regular increments, and open source after a high bar of total revenue is reached.

Alternatively work out a company sale that doesn't include the name or the product. Sell the team, the office space, the experience, and a copy of the product which must be rebranded or reengineered into something else but leave the original product and name on the market with a maintenance staff and original copyright.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#144
Lots of people here mentioned they are looking for Evernote replacements. Here is my experience with this:

Joplin[1] seems to be the best in my view. It's cross-platform, has decent sync capabilities, plus a web clipper. I've been using this for a while and have liked it a lot so far.

I used Quiver[2] for a while when I used to run macOS, but moved away from it because it was macOS specific. It also had some features lacking, namely no spell check (an issue that Joplin also has, although I believe this is being worked on). It also dosen't have a web clipper.

OneNote is ok, but I don't run Windows (I used it at work at one point). The killer feature it has is collaboration with other uses on the same domain, a la Google Docs. If that's not a use case you have, it's probably not worthwhile. Also no web clipper.

I briefly tried zim[3], but found that it lacked polish, and didn't have a mobile client or a web clipper, so I never fully moved on to it.

For a long time, I used Sphinx[4] plus several extensions and wrote everything in rst, with syncing accomplished via git. This turned out not to be very ergonomic to use, had no mobile client, and no web clipper.

Some other note taking apps that I've heard of but not tried personally:

* Turtl[5]

* TagSpaces[6] - tried the demo briefly, but didn't like the UI, also the iOS client was abandoned at that time

* Standard Notes[7]

* Inkdrop[8]

1 - https://github.com/laurent22/joplin

2 - http://happenapps.com/#quiver

3 - https://zim-wiki.org/

4 - http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/restructuredtext/b...

5 - https://turtlapp.com/

6 - https://www.tagspaces.org/

7 - https://standardnotes.org/

8 - https://inkdrop.app/

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#145

SaaS subscriptions are magical when they work; they provide much needed regularity to cash flow forecasting which assuages investor timidity. However, creating a subscription model doesn’t necessarily mean there is a service that warrants it.

The other side of that coin is subscription models are great for corporate software. Nobody wants to work at the company using ten year old broken software because corporate wants to delay the upgrade cost as long as possible and then roughing through the botched upgrade process.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#146

I don't use Evernote any longer for several reasons (lack of Linux support, privacy, etc), but I haven't been able to find anything to replace it for my use case. Evernote has a great web clipper and handles handwritten notes and scanned PDF documents really well. That, combined with its reasonably good search and organization features (tags, notebooks) made it really useful for me.

I've found their web clipper has really gone downhill. Best I can tell is that it's getting conflicts with ad-blocking plugins over cookies - as in I need to log in all the time and sometimes it maybe works at all.

In the bigger picture, it seems from a customer side that the vast majority of what they've been focused on developing over the past few years has zero value to me (i.e. work chat). They ought to be very concerned about their future if that's how their product is being perceived as evolving.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#147
post #140
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subscription is great for the company "selling", might be fine for other companies paying it, but I absolutely despise it as an end-user/private customer and will do everything I can to find an alternative (e.g. with a single-purchase license).

Single purchase licenses are way better but a company with a cloud component can not be sustainable on that model. One option is to provide a way to offload the cloud storage to another company (such as Dropbox syncing).

1. I might not need the sync functionality 2. I already have a subscription to Google Drive + free quota is available on all others

I think having a cloud component is often used as an excuse to explain the subscription model.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#148
I used to love Evernote. The thing that killed my enthusiasm for them was the constant upselling, even for paid accounts.

I paid for a Plus monthly subscription (a lower tier) and there were constant advertisements within the app to upgrade to Premium. Upgrade buttons that would reappear even when I remove them, notices on the bottom of the note UI, etc.

I could understand the constant advertising for free accounts, but for paid accounts it was infuriating.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code quality of the service they were offering: It's improved a little recently but search is still bad, the shared document function was very buggy and made material disappear. General bugs and niggles in past.

> search is still bad Search is hard. Google has the benefit of getting a lot of training data. Corporate intranet search, searching your documents, etc. has to actually figure out relevancy and can't infer it from having already served that query thousands of times in the last day.

This is the problem Slack solved, their search is pretty good

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#150
post #118

It used to be fantastic. The killer app for me was that it was actually impressively good at searching text in images which at the time felt like magic. Like you could take a picture of a whiteboard or your handwritten notes from a meeting or slide on a screen at a conference and then do a free text search of the keywords in it a few months later and find it. It was also really good at clipping web pages and helping…

I'd love that picture text search to come back, sounds like a fantastic feature
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