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

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

#451

Post by lifeonlars »

raverbashing wrote: post #164
briHass wrote: post #147

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…

Taking notes is a feature, not a product And given how the "process cyclists" of Notion will move to anything that has more bells and whistles, while the rest of the 99% will use what's available for free and syncs online, it's a hard place to compete ("process cyclists": will pay a lot for every small but hyperoptimized accessory)

You're contradicting yourself. Taking notes is a feature for many, but a product for people whose working style involves taking lots and lots of notes.

Call them "process cyclists" if you want, there is a bimodal distribution for how much people use notes apps, and the people near the high mode are prepared to pay monthly for something good, and tend to be extremely loyal.

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

#452

Post by system2 »

emodendroket wrote: post #190
system2 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can use a basic hosting with backup features, you can simply use a $5 droplet to sync almost everything possibly you can think of. Or OneDrive / Google Drive if you are using Windows based applications with databases. It is really not that difficult to keep data safe and backed up.

I mean, yeah, if for some reason you think Google Drive is safer than Google’s purpose-built notes application, that is an option.

As a backup option. Not their entire service. I tend to think heavily encrypted files could be safe there.

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

#453

Post by pphysch »

seanhunter wrote: post #362
belthesar wrote: post #79

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…

I have to say changing to obsidian has been great. 1. there are opensource tools to convert from evernote to obsidian so it Just Works [tm] and you don't lose anything. 2. My docs are now in markdown in a normal filesystem so it's easy for me to back them up, sync them, have everything work on different OSs etc 3. I choose to pay for obsidian sync because I want to fund them but you don't have to 4. Community plugins…

I set up Obsidian+Syncthing on my desktop+mobile devices a couple years ago and have had zero technical issues, while Obsidian has significantly improved their product since, IME. It just works AND I own my data.

It's a real gem among mountains of SaaS/VC nonsense.

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

#454

Post by jimt1234 »

dboreham wrote: post #91
jimt1234 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't Evernote precede Notes? My understanding is that Evernote was the first "notes" app, but I'm old; I could be making shit up in my head.

Older than...Lotus Notes?

Short story about Lotus Notes: Back in high school, a friend of mine started writing "code" for Lotus Notes; can't remember what the "code" was called, though - templates, plugins, something like that. Anyway, he started selling his stuff; first to accountants and small businesses (his dad was an accountant), then he started selling to local banks (in Modesto). His dad used to do all the sales, and my friend would go along to meetings and just sit there. Then, he sold the "code" through magazine ads. Finally, he somehow got connected to corporations in San Francisco and started making a ton of money (for a high school kid). Last I heard, just after we all graduated high school, he moved to San Francisco to start a full-time company. I have no idea what happened after that. Steve, I hope you did well. ... His situation taught me two things: (1) you could use computers for more than games. And (2) a "little guy" could start a company and actually make money with software.

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

#455

Post by coffeeling »

dkarl wrote: post #369

This was my impetus to finally close my account and delete my data. I was holding on to it because Notion's import sucks and would only import a few notes at a time, so I had to do a lot of different imports to get all the notes in all the notebooks, and I wouldn't be surprised if I still missed a few. (I have lots of notes — virtually everything I wanted to remember and keep forever, I put in Evernote.) I'm a bit sa…

Depending on what you value in Evernote, Notion may not be the best replacement.

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

#456

Post by kepano »

BigBar wrote: post #328
swayson wrote: post #77

Obsidian.md for the win. I used to use evernote way back when they started, was cool software, then they started scaling and added worst search UI I have ever come across. That day, I deleted my account and went markdown with my own storage. Don't see the benefit of why your notes should be controlled by others.

I use Obsidian for quite a few things, but I view Obsidian and Evernote as different apps functionally. I can't email notes into Obsidian. Obsidian doesn't have a web clipper, note reminders, markup tools. I mean sure, I could cover some of that with plug-ins, but at a certain point things become inconvenient. For text-only notes Obsidian is great. For web clips, emailing notes in, multimedia, I just find EN much eas…

Obsidian Web Clipper: https://stephanango.com/obsidian-web-clipper

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

#457

Post by getlawgdon »

Ha. Interesting reading through the comments. I recently downgraded everything in Evernote after seeing that Evernote was reporting 3 different service tiers for my account in different places. I kept getting nagged to re-up. I finally did and in the process, with a HIGH degree of intention, selected the "monthly" slider fully planning to cancel my account while salvaging some of the notes.

Lo and behold, unbelievably, Evernote somehow still charges me the annual rate. Absolute transaction dark pattern happening in there somewhere/somehow.

This is after a long sequence of ineffective exchanges with support regarding my tier, and also a long period of being a customer (10 years?) and seeing basically zero feature development in line with long-running community requests.

Net/net: I'm done with Evernote. Just ain't working for me.

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

#458

Post by pyrophane »

Not sure about the veracity of this, but it is in-line with how people said Bending Spoons operates at the time of the takeover: they buy up apps and then raise prices to try to squeeze more cash out of the existing subscriber base while also cutting costs by firing development staff.

Seems like an almost inevitable end.

Evernote was a great app once upon a time. I'm still not aware of anything that works quite like it. Unfortunately they decided to take too much outside money, which put pressure on them to grow revenue by finding new kinds of customers. They started adding "team" features that no one wanted (work chat?) while neglecting the core features everyone relied on. Prices went up.

Nothing left to do but move on.

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

#459

Post by bosie »

Zambyte wrote: post #350
bosie wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On ios you can only do icloud though

It blows my mind that Apple can tell you how you're allowed to copy your plain text files from one of your computers to another one of your computers. If you look at the behavior sans the branding, it would not be hard to label it malware.

not sure we have the same definition of 'malware'. the problem isn't copying/syncing the file from one computer to another, that works just fine. but obsidian can't read outside its own app folder IIRC.

i sync files with dropbox to my ios devices all the time.

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

#460

Post by bosie »

TooManyProjects wrote: post #337
bosie wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On ios you can only do icloud though

I tried using iCloud to sync for a year and went back to Obsidian Sync. I’m not sure exactly what the culprit was, but frequently, I would find my ToDo note (which was used the most) would be stuck and fail to sync for days. Rebooting the stick machine would clear the issue. I was using two Macs and my iPhone at the time.

because it uses icloud drive. and that syncs poorly and on its own schedule. it would sometimes take a day or so to get a file from my mac studio to my macbook. it is crazy how bad icloud is.
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