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Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

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41–50 of 328 posts

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#41
post #6

The problem with both Dropbox and Evernote is that their minimum pricing tier is too expensive for what they provide - particularly when both functions are provided as part of the Microsoft Office package with is the same price as Dropbox alone. I used both for years and would have happily paid a couple of dollars a month as I do for the basic tier of Google Drive. I abandoned both when the 2 device limit came in.

This. Office 365 package provides full office suit + 1TB of storage + 50GB ad-free mail box for the same price and they are already profitable at this price tag. If you are an startup offering any service more expensive than office 365 you are doing something really wrong.

Well it's not so much that you're doing something wrong. It's that Office 365 has such a ridiculous market share so their developments costs make up almost none of the price. Any start up is almost inevitably going to find their first development costs push their price up so they've really got to offer something new.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#42
Due to some weird bug in Evernote, I lost about 10% of all my notes. Some of them critical. This happened about a year ago, and I never found out the actual cause. I think it was some kind of bug triggered by the combination of syncing from/to the mobile app and the desktop app. But I completely stopped trusting Evernote after this and stopped using it.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#43

I'm a paid customer of Evernote, I must say that it works great and it has no reasonable replacement. I use it for all kinds of notes, like for example short tutorials on the command line, issuing commands that are hard to remember, TODO lists (both at work and for grocery shopping), meeting notes, listing pros and cons, everything. In meetings I like the ability to record audio, or to add pictures I take with my pho…

I’d argue that it’s precisely because of your worries (lack of portability, vendor lock-in), that a lot of people would rather not use it.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#44
post #32

It's absolutely crazy some of the reasons stated for evernote failing to get investment early on. Today people would be clamoring to invest in a company that was bringing in users by offering the product for free. The sell is so compelling "Get our users to write everything in evernote, build a huge userbase and then you can start to monetize because you've got a fantastic way of keeping them". I feel like that's one…

But they gave the full feature set away for free. Hoping that users would be generous enough to "make a small donation over on Patreon" (to use today's language). In a shit economy.

No one does that today, not even Google. You get limited features for free.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#45

What a strange article. It's a note taking program. It has search. The author called it brilliant. Huh? As a long-time (no longer avid) user, the screenshot of the old version made me nostalgic, but I don't remember the search as different to a standard search function.

I found it weird too how they presented as revolutionary a note taking app with search. Evernote's strength was great execution and good timing (having the app on the App Store very early) but other than that it was just a note taking app, and plenty of them existed before Evernote.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#46

Honestly, who was sitting there in the middle of a CS class at Standford taking notes and found themselves so absolutely bored to a point of absurdity that they frustratingly sighed out loud, "man, if only there was a way more exciting way to go about doing this."; Which prompted the "ahah" lightbulb moment of the guy sitting just within earshot, one row over, who just so happened to be jotting down his own notes on…

Ok...

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, my computer is slow, maybe for another reason i don't know. But openning a google docs file on my Chrome is much faster than openning a local Excel file. Maybe in your case it's different. That's my experience with most of desktop apps. The only exception, is VSCode and iTerm2. Can't live without them.

> I don't compare to anything > is much faster than If your key point is 'it requires my RAM and CPU usage' then you're going to be disappointed to learn that a website also requires your RAM and CPU usage.

I don't compare RAM & CPU usage (per your previous comment).

"Faster" means speed.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't compare to anything > is much faster than If your key point is 'it requires my RAM and CPU usage' then you're going to be disappointed to learn that a website also requires your RAM and CPU usage.

I don't compare RAM & CPU usage (per your previous comment). "Faster" means speed.

[deleted]

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#50
If Evernote will pursue the "Spaces" route, it's going to end up like Google+, trying to be like others without truly understanding why.

What they should do, is double-down where the puck is going in the context of individual productivity.

What is interesting in cases like this - it's all there, in their own forums. A roadmap vector based on their own WHY in a form of their userbase voice.

That being said, I still use Evernote. For existing Evernote users there are no real alternatives to it atm in my opinion (yup I'm using Notion, but for diff purpose). It's astonishing how much bullets can an original purpose-driven WHY take over the years and still keep going.

P.S I just build a tool for Evernote (https://neuracache.com/) just because these are the things that were missing for me the most. Again it's all in their forums, just as an example in the context of my own itch : https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/82427-spaced-repetitio...

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