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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

#241

Post by PhantomGremlin »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #182
tedunangst wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on the backup tech, that can be kind of difficult. I can't run arbitrary SQL against the database backups I've got stored in tarsnap. Nor against tape, etc. For that matter, isn't the (or one) reason for having a backup so that errant deletes don't obliterate everything?

I was always under the impression that nothing really gets deleted online.

In the short term you're absolutely correct.

In the long term everything suffers from "data decay". It's just too hard to keep old files around forever.

E.g. there were comments I made on Usenet many years ago. Google has previously attempted to preserve those, but they seem to be fading away into the ether. That's okay by me.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#242

Post by mintplant »

antiffan wrote: post #226
lukefreiler wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Simplenote was actually created by Simperium (YC S10) [1], a company founded by Fred Cheng and Mike Johnston and acquired by Automattic in 2013 [2].

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/simperium

[2] http://simplenote.com/2013/01/24/simplenote-supercharged/

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#243

Post by virtuabhi »

I have recently moved to Quiver. Its user interface is very similar to Evernote. But it has support for Latex, code highlighting, and markdown! In addition, you can specify the location of library as a Dropbox folder, where data is written in JSON. Here is the data format https://github.com/HappenApps/Quiver/wiki/Quiver-Data-Format

Lack of Latex support, being able to export raw data easily, and long startup time which renders notes unaccessible are my three problems with Evernote. These problems don't exist with Quiver.

http://happenapps.com/#quiver

PS no relationship with either Quiver or Evernote

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#244

Post by hueving »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #182
tedunangst wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on the backup tech, that can be kind of difficult. I can't run arbitrary SQL against the database backups I've got stored in tarsnap. Nor against tape, etc. For that matter, isn't the (or one) reason for having a backup so that errant deletes don't obliterate everything?

I was always under the impression that nothing really gets deleted online.

That only applies to things you want deleted.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#245

Post by baldfat »

rodgerd wrote: post #203
lukefreiler wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'd have moved by now if I could find something that was both highly cross-platform (Mac/Win/iOS) and lighter (Markdown pretty please). I've compromised on OneNote, which isn't lightweight, but has become impressively cross-platform.

I personally have been using git more and more for my note taking. I use RStudio and RMarkdown for my notes and it has been great and easily spread to all my personal devices.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#246

Post by nsrivast »

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…

At the moment, people are implicitly trading their personal data for services and convenience (communication, transportation, etc). Yet our data has value not just aggregated across millions of users and trained to sell ads; it has value to us as individuals: third party platforms can disappear, get hacked, act dishonestly, or change their business model.

There have been advances in systems that reclaim or duplicate ownership of third-party data back toward the user, personal API/quantified being the most recent. I think the missing link is not the technology, but rather a social movement that promotes the value of data access and ownership. This might be one silver lining to recent data breach and hacking scandals.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#247

Post by erobbins »

meepadock wrote: post #229

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, real…

Why do you say the new CEO is a joke? Just curious.. he hasn't been around long enough to pass judgement on, I wouldn't think?

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#248

Post by Justin_K »

Bullet lists - I literally left this app for One Note because Evernote COULD NOT properly handle bullet lists. The following is not my post but as of my time of leaving the app, you STILL couldn't properly manage a bullet list. There are dozens of posts asking for bullet lists to be fixed.

I used 5% of the overall features - all I want is to take notes and have them indexed. There was so much bloat and I couldn't make a proper bullet list, so I had no choice to switch. I never understood why people paid for this app.

https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/67060-list-functionali...

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#249

Post by Myrmornis »

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.

I disagree. That's not the attraction for me. The attraction for me (personally) is that they have nice image capture and processing software that allows me to link diagrams and math from my paper notebooks to electronic documents with a quick picture taken on my phone. They're a private corporation and not one that is too large to fail; I wouldn't rely on them to not lose my data, I would use something like git for that.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#250

Post by pyre »

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…

> root cause of failures like this is a principle fundamental to Evernote: data owned by an application, rather than data accessed by an application

Not really. It's not like MS Word reading your .doc find can't corrupt it leaving you hanging if you don't have a backup. Catastrophic data loss isn't cured by the "data accessed by an application" model.

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