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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

#391

Post by FilterSweep »

davidjgraph wrote: post #279
twhb wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I fully agree, but as a vendor that only implements bring-your-own-storage, I can tell you it's not much fun from the supplier standpoint. Our no 1 support request is something along the lines of: "I've deleted my diagram, can you restore it for me?" "No. We don't store your data, we never even see it" "What a useless service, just get my data back or I want to speak to random escalation person " 99% of users don't c…

> 99% of users don't care about privacy, architecture, etc. They want it to just work (TM).

This is the sad Catch 22 we live in where privacy is jeopardized at the cost of ease of use

Do you think there is any value in educating the customer further? Periodically (5mins) reminding the user with a small notification to save (and backup) their work? I agree it can become a UX Nightmare (e.g. MS Paperclipguy), but having a checkbox "do not remind me again" could possibly go a long way as well.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#392

Post by lemevi »

coldtea wrote: post #330
lemevi wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox is undeniably better. It gets synching right and this is so incredibly important. People should be rooting for Dropbox, not hoping for its demise. Everyone else has screwed up synching and screwing up synching means lost files! Lost photos of loved ones! Lost ideas, lost important documents! Dropbox is worth the price because it gets this right.

> Everyone else has screwed up synching and screwing up synching means lost files! Lost photos of loved ones! Lost ideas, lost important documents! Dropbox is worth the price because it gets this right. If they rely on Dropbox getting syncing right to not lose "important files, photos of loved ones, ideas and important documents" then they are doing it wrong. They should backup anyway, and only then trust Dropbox for…

You are not considering the implications of how synching works. How do you know you lost files? I back up with Time Machine, Time Machine runs every hour and creates a limited set of back ups I can go back to. Meanwhile if there's a synching problem and files get eaten by my file synching service Time Machine will happily assume those files were removed by me. One year later when I go to find some picture of my daughter I took and the file is gone you tell me what backup I go to to restore that file. You have 1 year's worth of hourly backups? I don't.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#393

Post by lemevi »

Spooky23 wrote: post #240
lemevi wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox is undeniably better. It gets synching right and this is so incredibly important. People should be rooting for Dropbox, not hoping for its demise. Everyone else has screwed up synching and screwing up synching means lost files! Lost photos of loved ones! Lost ideas, lost important documents! Dropbox is worth the price because it gets this right.

Amen. OneDrive for Business is a great example of screwed up sync. Whomever made the call to release that steaming pile should be flogged. Rumor has it they are finally fixing the broken sync client. When the MS product guys were pretending that our network/workstation image was the reason that OneDrive sync broke, I took a laptop out of the box, put Windows 8 on it, streamed down Office ProPlus and signed in a dummy…

> Rumor has it they are finally fixing the broken sync client.

It's already too late. They've shown they can't be trusted to sync files. It's ridiculous to me to even consider trusting them with my files. Dropbox actually has had a problem in the past but it was a bug they fixed immediately. They care about this so much.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#394

Post by thanatropism »

gutnor wrote: post #104
eli wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

File sync is a feature of the Google Suite, but Dropbox is much better than Google Drive. Dropbox gets a lot of subtle things right. Maybe in the long term you're right, but I'm not so sure. I think Dropbox Teams is too expensive but I'm paying it anyway because I think it's that much better. (I think that's a sign they set the prices exactly right)

Dropbox problem is that it was obviously better several years ago so its user acquisition was easy. Nowadays dropbox needs to convince user of other services that it is better. On paper though, dropbox provides less for more money - that's going to be difficult. I share your opinion - they are better. The reason I know is because I have been a client for years and they never let me down even in weird syncing scenario…

Do OneDrive or Google have automatic file versioning? As in: you accidentally corrupt or save over an important file and 15-75 previous versions can be restored via the web interface?

I'm so reliant on this that I'm hacking together an automatic-commit scheme with git and a Linux server that syncs some important folders.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#395

Post by adekok »

asuffield wrote: post #306
davidjgraph wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree, but as a vendor that only implements bring-your-own-storage, I can tell you it's not much fun from the supplier standpoint. Our no 1 support request is something along the lines of: "I've deleted my diagram, can you restore it for me?" "No. We don't store your data, we never even see it" "What a useless service, just get my data back or I want to speak to random escalation person " 99% of users don't c…

(Disclaimer: I work at Google, not speaking for the company, etc) We can do both. Google stores, backs up, secures, and generally ensures your data is safe, and you can click a button to download it all if you think you can do any of that better. This is probably too hard to ask every company to do the same, as it would exclude smaller companies who don't have the resources (this takes a lot of time and development!)…

> This is probably too hard to ask every company to do the same, as it would exclude smaller companies who don't have the resources (this takes a lot of time and development!)

What's hard about "Backup to google drive / dropbox / icloud"?

I've seen single-developer applications do this. If a company of 10 people can't do this, they need to question the competence / diligence of their team.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#396

Post by adekok »

doug1001 wrote: post #272
nsrivast wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

or is the problem just a poorly designed data model by Evernote? So for instance, i have had a github account since 2009, and i access both my personal repos and my repos that belong to my employer using the same accountName. When i joined my current employer, i no longer had access to my prior employer's repos on github, though my access to my own repos (both public and private) remained unchanged. And when they swi…

Github took the intelligent approach of separating identity from authorization. You have your own identity, which doesn't change. On top of that, you have a set of authorization permissions which can be updated, added to, and deleted from. Changing authorization permission X doesn't affect authorization permission Y.

Evernote seems to instead have lumped identity and authorization together. And had only one set of authorization permissions: all of your stuff. So when the permissions change, they all change.

This approach is nothing more than laziness. It's not just "not thinking ahead", it's completely ignoring 40 years of practice in the field.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#397

Post by outworlder »

> I joined Evernote as CEO two months ago

> Today we let go of 47 people from the Evernote team and announced the closure of three of our global offices. We are grateful for the immense contributions of each and every affected person.

So, new CEO gets appointed and starts torching the place. I suppose that will help the bottom line short term. But I'd really like to see the number of resignations in the next days.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#398

Post by thanatropism »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #263
symstym wrote: post #126

Long ago I got tired of Evernote's bugs and creep of extraneous features and switched to Workflowy [1] for the majority of my general (plaintext) note-taking. I love Workflowy and can't imagine life without it. [1] https://workflowy.com/

Serious question. If you are just making plaintext notes how come you are not just using your text editor of choice? Vim, Emacs, Sublime, Atom etc etc

This is why all my App Store purchases of late have been text editors with Markdown and Dropbox support.

Seriously: I have three text editors in the lower four icons of my iPad (four if the ssh client counts): one to have the important work thing open (Editorial), another with my personal note folder (1Write) and yet another for just typing text quickly (iA Writer), jotting quick lists, etc. The "office girlfriend" will often grab my iPad during a meeting to tell me something in private or start writing down notes, and she knows she's only allowed to open the third one.

Startup-er folk: pay attention to "enhanced Markdown editors" like Editorial (good inline preview) and 1Write (decent to see an entire folder at once, much like the Evernote UI), not to mention the "todo.txt" category. Make comparable desktop clients (so I don't have to muck about in Sublime Text or Notepad++ trying to reproduce the folder view situation).

Sell the world the beauty of plain text, including budding formats like todo.txt and the kind of YAML+markdown that static blog generators use.

(When I was young and very abstract/naïve, I dreamed of starting a company to sell custom DSLs. But this is the next best thing: develop text-based DSLs for tagging, todo lists, meeting notes, etc -- readable-but-standardisable standards like Markdown. Make great UIs, make them multi platform.)

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#399

Post by smrtinsert »

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…

Sounds very similar to the dropbox for business issue that happened a few years ago. I wonder in what universe these storagey providers think this is possibly ok.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#400

Post by mgkimsal »

hmsimha wrote: post #235
mgkimsal wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't trust them with my notes after google notebook went away.

Google notebook was amazing! But at the very least, they did export all notebook notes to Google docs, so it wasn't like they completely binned all user data.

agreed, it wasn't the worst outcome
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