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Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

nytimes.com

91–100 of 354 posts

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#92

Instead of this 'long and winding road' wry style pr, the reality is EN spectacularly screwed up. They had the world at their feet but got in their own way. I still use it because incredibly there isn't anything better i'm aware of (I tried onenote but didn't like it) but for me EN is a case history of the incompetent side of valley hype

how did they spectacularly screw up? honestly asking.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#93

What alternatives would you recommend?

Personally, for a long time Google Keep worked for me (although it has gotten a bit cluttered)

I tried Notion and OneNote but their mobile apps were just too annoying and clunky (reaching 200+ MBs) for the value they provided for my barely 2-3mb of notes

Currently I'm back to Google Keep with occasionally using Trello and Google Tasks

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#94
post #89
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mentioning OneNote sort of makes another point as well. I expect a lot of Office users have never heard of OneNote. The whole general category that lets people save notes of pieces of the Web for later use just turned out to be not that big a thing for most people. I should be a target for this sort of software and used something else in the same general vein for a few years. But I don't really like everything tied u…

I, like many others, use OneNote for science and engineering purposes. I use it to keep hand-written notes from seminars, calculations, discussions with collaborators, as well as keeping track of every every wafer I've fabricated on. I take my tablet into the cleanroom with me. When I'm repairing a piece of equipment, I take pictures and paste them in my notebook and draw on them where I think a failure has occurred.…

The tool I used for a time was fairly explicitly aimed at researchers as I recall. Though TBF that's probably a pretty niche area. (See also Scrivener on the Mac which targets screenwriting and book writers. It's been around for ages so I assume it's making someone a bit of money but, I also assume, very much in the lifestyle business level of revenue.)

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#95
post #59
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you so much, the ny times seems to have my number whatever i do but this works.

$ curl [nytimes article link] > article.html Then open it. I wish this worked for the WSJ too, but it appears they're smart enough not to send the full article text in the initial request unless you're logged in

Thanks never heard of curl before today (!), I think it's something i need to install (i'm on windows)

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#96
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often think of the story of the guy who posted here about how his startup "failed" but in reality it just didn't bring in the massive cash flow that was hoped for. IIRC he bought it from the investors for cheap (so they could get it off their books) and then just ran it as one guy (maybe a few more added part time later)... and it does just fine in that conext, and who knows what might happen from there. Kinda make…

This also opens up the opportunity for a lot of lifestyle businesses. It may, at first, seem like a major downside having a venture backed startup competing directly with you. However, they are likely following an all or nothing strategy and there is a chance they go bust. If they end up closing down or pivoting they have helped to create the market and all their users will be looking for an alternative.

Completely true, Pinboard is a good example in regard to Delicious going bust.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#97
post #78

Most people don't know this, but evernote was created maybe 15 years ago, as a desktop app ( https://lifehacker.com/download-of-the-day-evernote-2-0-wind... ). I used evernote before their version 3, which is the one everyone knows today. Evernote 2 was a brilliant note taking app, the first and best of its kind, and it cost a few dozen bucks, which I gladly paid... Then they shifted to the online version called Ever…

Did the original license for Evernote 2 stop working?

It seems perfectly reasonable to create a new subscription license for a new cloud product.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#98

I remember when someone first showed me evernote with a bunch of hype. And I was like "This is pointless, I can't believe it's a company." I think we can refer to that as the age of 'cloud madness' where anything and everything cloud-related was the new hotness. I think we've forgotten just how strong the buzz-wordiness was around cloud, it was prolific.

People still talk up cloud all the time. Well, when Slack is working, or Gmail isn't having an outage, or traffic's not being routed to China...

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#100
post #99

That is all fine, but there fundamental question still remains as to why anyone would think, or thought, that a note taking app would be worth billions in valuation.

Yeah. I remember thinking the same thing about microblogging and photo sharing. :-(
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