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The first dead Unicorn will be Evernote

syrah.co

81–90 of 103 posts

Re: The first dead Unicorn will be Evernote

#81
post #7

We tried Evernote for business in our office for around 6 months. The sharing and communication feature-set was really bad. In a shared notebook we ended up with 'conflicted copies' of lots of important notes that really needed to be an authority on things. The 'Work Chat' feature is spectacularly bad and unusable - to the point of comedy. Most of us flipped way to using Google Apps and Keep Notes, which just really…

Google's Keep was the Evernote killer for me. It loads faster and I can start a note or list quicker. Trello fills the other gaps to the point that Evernote is just an archive of notes that I rarely have to consult.

Re: The first dead Unicorn will be Evernote

#82

As a paying customer, I see Evernote as awesome and terrible at the same time. I've enjoyed using Alternote on OSX as an Evernote client to get what I really want out of Evernote...a place to store, umm, notes. No chats. No web clippings and highlights. It's just notes I write, and associated attached media like document scans or images, in a clean interface. One of my favorite Evernote features is automatic OCR of i…

I switched from Evernote to OneNote earlier this year using http://stefanstools.sourceforge.net/Evernote2Onenote.html to do it. I had to manually organize the tabs that were created based on my Evernote labels, but it only took about an hour after the tool had copied all my notes for me. I'm glad I made the switch.

Re: The first dead Unicorn will be Evernote

#83

If the original author reads this; I found the combination of webkit anti-aliasing with a thin body weight to be instantly eye-strain-inducing, and the deliberate hiding of scroll bars even on non-mobile viewports made for a persistent sense of unease.

I turned on reader mode in Safari because that font was so bad. Also, I HATE when sites make me unable to zoom on mobile. The designer does not know better than the reader how the page should be viewed, let me zoom in so I can read your stupid skinny font.

Re: The first dead Unicorn will be Evernote

#84

Doesn't it seem nasty to claim that a large established company may go out of business? Just the claim can hurt their business. Evernote is fairly useful. I pay the minimum amount above the free tier. I enjoy the product but I only use it perhaps 10 minutes a day, on average.

The post is not about them going out of business; in fact, numerous times I suggest that that is not likely to happen. The post concerns the $1B valuation's validity. It's possible to have a very nice, profitable company making a note taking application and also not be a unicorn.

Thanks for the clarification Josh! I just went back to re-read the article.

It is an interesting scenario of a company receiving a lot of funding, having a huge paper valuation, but in the end just being a mildly profitable company with little return on investment.

Re: The first dead Unicorn will be Evernote

#85

What on earth is this trying to say? Evernote, located in Redwood City, CA, and directly on the 101, is a bit north of the tech companies that dot Silicon Valley and far south of those that have headquarters in San Francisco. In other words, Evernote isn't exactly on its own in terms of tech-oriented neighbors that it competes with for talent.

Hey, author here. You're right, this could be more clear. The takeaway is supposed to be that it's not as though HQ is in Cleveland or Cincinnati where there's a lot less competition for tech jobs - but I can see how the wording is weird!

Stop with the gray text on the white background. On the device I'm on I can't make out the text well enough to read comfortably, so I bailed. And realistically I won't come back to the article on another device later on.

Re: The first dead Unicorn will be Evernote

#86

What on earth is this trying to say? Evernote, located in Redwood City, CA, and directly on the 101, is a bit north of the tech companies that dot Silicon Valley and far south of those that have headquarters in San Francisco. In other words, Evernote isn't exactly on its own in terms of tech-oriented neighbors that it competes with for talent.

I thought what it was saying was the talent pool they're competing for is sapped both by SF-based companies and Valley-based companies. But rereading it that doesn't make sense either...

Same. I Thought the implication being that EverNote doesn't need to care about competing employers because of the distance.

Re: The first dead Unicorn will be Evernote

#87

So what's the alternative to Evernote? The article lists Google Docs, which doesn't really seem equivalent, and OneNote. I'm using OneNote right now to organize planning for a media/writing project, and the experience leaves a lot to be desired. The writing interface in particular is clunky, in the web client and on Android -- on my phone, I have to pop open a menu and then a drawer just to switch bold text on or off…

you aware of Google Keep?

I've moved away from Keep for one reason: Keep on Android downloads everything. One day I was trying to figure out where my space went and found Keep with hundreds of megabytes in space used. I was it was a true cloud service.

Re: The first dead Unicorn will be Evernote

#88
We make a better more collaborative app that centers on really simple notes as the core thing. You can jot some Knotes but you can also share them natively like slack and put lots of content from other services into them. Knotable.com

Feedback welcome. Still beta

But the Chrome extension is 1.0 and doing really well!

Knotable.com/chrome/note

Re: The first dead Unicorn will be Evernote

#89

Doesn't it seem nasty to claim that a large established company may go out of business? Just the claim can hurt their business. Evernote is fairly useful. I pay the minimum amount above the free tier. I enjoy the product but I only use it perhaps 10 minutes a day, on average.

"Doesn't it seem nasty to claim that a large established company may go out of business?"

I'm not sure how you can consider a company that's still dependent on VC funding for survival to be an "established" company. During that phase, a company is still in a precarious state, and its survival beyond the current funding round is hardly guaranteed. The investors, management, employees and customers are all aware of that (or should be).

And even companies that have been self-sufficient for a long time die on a regular basis. Technologies come and go, new competitors enter markets, management screws up, etc.

The business press writes about companies in trouble all the time. Potential investors and customers need to know what the downsides are before investing in or adopting a company's technology. Journalists who just write happy stories about companies are doing their readers a disservice.

Re: The first dead Unicorn will be Evernote

#90

Evernote lost some of my data, which is like a money market fund breaking the buck. You just can't allow that to happen. If you do you'll get carried out. Twitter could lose a few of my tweets and it wouldn't matter, you lose my valuable notes? GTFO I should add that I was a paying customer. I was already struggling with the crappy UI and looking for an alternative when the data loss happened. For a while I tried dif…

Same here. After that happened, never used it again.
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