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

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191–200 of 869 posts

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

#191

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…

Remember Evernote had those physical notebooks where you could write in them with real pens and pay the subscription and then take a picture and upload them with OCR? That was the only thing I remember that you couldnt get for free.

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

#192
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, it should be possible for software to be done. I have never used Evernote, but I am not sure how much innovation is required in the note-taking space.

Perhaps, but setting aside the philosophical point, Evernote was nowhere near "done". Their 'new' client software (Electron-based, of course) never even achieved feature parity with their 'legacy' client software. The mobile app wasn't exactly screamingly performant, to put it nicely. Really basic core use cases, like creating a note, typing in a title and some content, tagging it with a keyword, and saving it, requi…

One could argue that their legacy apps were pretty close to done though. If they'd just maintained them rather than switching to the current garbage, they'd probably have a lot happier customers now.

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

#193
post #173

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…

Have you tried Obsidian? 3 days ago one of the obsidian makers posted this: https://twitter.com/kepano/status/1675626836821409792 Key quote: "These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian, but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last." Seems to align with your philosophy

I replied to him with with my idea and article https://twitter.com/brajeshwar/status/1675905574624702465

From the article, “Right now, I use Obsidian to manage my notes. The beauty of this setup is that I can change tools anytime, while my notes remain free of any dependency.”

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

#194

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.

Yeah I'm on a grandfathered plan of $50USD which still seems steep.

Unsure what I'll do next.

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

#195

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.

The main reason I love apple notes is it's speed and sync. Just works.

I treed google keep and evernote. Syncing was always overwriting eachother. Starting slow.

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

#197

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…

> Then, for less than the cost of Evernote, you can get a O365 subscription and get the Office suite and 1TB of storage.

Take the slightly more expensive family pack, and 5 people can use it on 5 devices each. It's one of the too-good-to-be-true deals out there.

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

#200

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…

Remember Evernote had those physical notebooks where you could write in them with real pens and pay the subscription and then take a picture and upload them with OCR? That was the only thing I remember that you couldnt get for free.

I've used https://getrocketbook.com somewhat recently. Supports Evernote and other cloud services too.
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