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Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

blog.evernote.com

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Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#221

Post by CrackpotGonzo »

twhb wrote: post #212
jason_slack wrote: post #106

I was an Evernote Premium customer and enjoyed multi-device syncing and private notebooks. I had my own account, paid for out of my own pocket for a year. The company I worked for also decided to used Evernote and I could see our "Team" notebooks, right along with my stuff. When the company stopped using it, not only did I lose the "Team" notebooks, it took all of my personal data with it. I lost everything. Support…

I sound like a cynic when I say this, but the root cause of failures like this is a principle fundamental to Evernote: data owned by an application, rather than data accessed by an application. If all your data exists in a file hierachy that you can browse, edit manually, and back up, then you have the safety of relying only on foundational systems for the survival of your data, and the power to use your data as you…

Completely agree with this and I think the model of an application that accesses data is the only one I will trust going forward. Great example of this is Scrivener. I can have my files locally stored or in the cloud, but Scrivener just accesses, not owns the files.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#222

Post by mgkimsal »

latchkey wrote: post #94
cyberpanther wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My prediction, the next dead unicorn: Dropbox They are similar in that they haven't made anything note worthy in a while and their main product is really just a feature of bigger companies apps and services.

The issue I have with Dropbox is that their usage / pricing model is totally broken. If someone shares their folder with me, it shouldn't eat into my storage allocation.

i hated that - one of the main reasons I don't use dropbox. Early on I had a bunch of clients all raving about how cool dropbox was - each sharing 200-500meg projects with me. Within days I'm hitting a 2gig limit, being encouraged to upgrade my account just to use a service someone else was forcing me to use. I use DB as little as possible.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#223

Post by PhasmaFelis »

ma2rten wrote: post #130
rsync wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is incredible. I'm sorry that behavior like that exists and that service providers can be so terrible at what they do. It also sounds like an implied admission, on the part of evernote, of not having working backups ? I would think that they would have found some way any way to get your data back to you given what just happened.

That might just mean that they delete all backups when the account gets deleted for privacy reasons.

My account once decided to throw away several dozen notes for no good reason (I had deleted a bunch of conflicting changes over several months, and when I emptied the trash, it wiped all the corresponding current notes on the server and all three of my devices). Evernote support couldn't do anything about it.

They also took like two weeks to respond to my problem ticket. I'd submitted it on New Year's Eve, so I anticipated having to wait a day or two, but that was pretty ridiculous.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#225

Post by PhasmaFelis »

mgkimsal wrote: post #216
Myrmornis wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't help OP but I am new to evernote and naively excited about it. One thing I like about it is that I can export my notebooks to an XML text format that contains the encoded images. So it seems to me that I can put my notebooks into git and not worry about losing anything. This thread is making me think I should investigate whether that is automatable; I was assuming it would be.

> So it seems to me that I can put my notebooks into git and not worry about losing anything most of the point of paying for evernote is they should remove the worry about losing anything . Their entire point for being is to record your notes. And keep them safe and accessible. If there's a statistically noticeable chance that they will lose some or all of your data, they have no substantive value.

Exactly. A big part of Evernote's appeal to me was that, synced across three devices and the cloud, my data would be safe even if my house burned down.

Then Evernote decided to delete several dozen of my notes from their server, and helpfully synced that change to all my devices.

I'm currently looking for a replacement that suits my needs. Microsoft OneNote looks promising, now that it has Mac/Android support.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#226

Post by antiffan »

lukefreiler wrote: post #196
jason_slack wrote: post #106

I was an Evernote Premium customer and enjoyed multi-device syncing and private notebooks. I had my own account, paid for out of my own pocket for a year. The company I worked for also decided to used Evernote and I could see our "Team" notebooks, right along with my stuff. When the company stopped using it, not only did I lose the "Team" notebooks, it took all of my personal data with it. I lost everything. Support…

I recently lost nearly a days writing - but apparently they only do a back-up every 8 hours, and I was off by one (I don't write in Evernote anymore, lesson learned). They did try to placate with 3 months free (after being a paying customer for years), but I'm just amazed that with the ~$300M of VC they've raised, they still haven't caught up to the real-time sync of Google Docs of 8+ years ago. Hopefully their new f…

I made the switch to Simplenote, and I've had a great experience so far. The main "sacrifice" is that you can only store plain next.

It was created by Automattic, Matt Mullenweg's company.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#227

Post by tdkl »

lukefreiler wrote: post #196
jason_slack wrote: post #106

I was an Evernote Premium customer and enjoyed multi-device syncing and private notebooks. I had my own account, paid for out of my own pocket for a year. The company I worked for also decided to used Evernote and I could see our "Team" notebooks, right along with my stuff. When the company stopped using it, not only did I lose the "Team" notebooks, it took all of my personal data with it. I lost everything. Support…

I recently lost nearly a days writing - but apparently they only do a back-up every 8 hours, and I was off by one (I don't write in Evernote anymore, lesson learned). They did try to placate with 3 months free (after being a paying customer for years), but I'm just amazed that with the ~$300M of VC they've raised, they still haven't caught up to the real-time sync of Google Docs of 8+ years ago. Hopefully their new f…

Dropbox with Markdown editors ? They exist on all platforms.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#228

Post by volaski »

tajen wrote: post #99
untog wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't it just stick to its knitting, and continue to offer something that works and people find valuable? Because now Google, Microsoft and Amazon offer it at a cheaper price and better integrated with their own products. The broader answer here is "Dropbox took a bunch of VC money, so 'just doing well enough' isn't an option for them and they have to stop at nothing to grow faster"

> took a bunch of VC money Notes-taking apps have the competition of . There isn't much left to do for a notes-taking app: Everything else is bells and whistles. Responsibilities should be called here. Dropbox, Evernote, Slack and GitHub are all 4 hosting a massive free service, highly replaceable with cheap alternatives, with low switching costs. I sincerely hope the VCs who invest in those companies have another pl…

Can't take you seriously when you say Github is highly replaceable. Try and go hosting your open source project on some obscure hosted code repository, let me know when you get lots of contributors.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#229

Post by meepadock »

I'm a long-time evernote premium customer who is saddened but not even slightly surprised by this.

I firmly believe that Evernote raised too much money, at far too high of a valuation, and they fucked themselves. They did not have the product and market to justify a $1B valuation. They just didn't. They bet huge on their ability to invent whole new markets that sound like they're related to evernote, but aren't, really. And unsurprisingly, that didn't pan out.

Now the core product has been stagnant for years; gaining "features" like work chat which were clearly dreamt up in a silo, completely disconnected from the market's needs. And now the troops will pay for management's complete and total fucking incompetence. And yes, I know one CEO is gone, but the new CEO is an absolute fucking joke as well.

And long-time customers like me... we keep hoping that OneNote or some similar product will add an "Import from Evernote" button. So that we can escape this mismanaged, formerly great product.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#230

Post by tdkl »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #144
wahsd wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Drive is really horrible in comparison to many other services.

Really? How so? I have about 60GB in total stored across Google Drive, OneDrive and DropBox. Other than OneDrive requiring me to login too frequently with the desktop folder syncing app they all work identically. I've yet to have an issue with syncing with any of them after editing documents in multiple machines. I'm not saying you're wrong I just haven't seen what you might be referring to hence why I asked.

When reinstalling your system, try to install Drive into existing folder with the data. Nope, you have to choose a new folder and redownload everything[1]. While this is tolerable for small data accounts, I wouldn't trust them with couple hundred GBs.

While installing Dropbox it just syncs the difference and done.

[1]There is a workaround but you need to think about it before reinstalling the OS (saving some user data or something).

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