Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices | Hacker News Reader

Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

blog.evernote.com

412 pointsjasondc448 comments

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 acknowledged it was a bug and told me that there was nothing they could do. They didn't even offer to let me have a few months free to catch back up and re-create my notebooks.

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 please with tools of your choosing. But if the application owns your data—if it stores it behind the scenes and never exposes it to you directly—then your data is exactly as fragile as that application. If there’s a bug, your data can disappear. If the company goes under, your application can rot to unusability. If the product is discontinued, the same. If the company kills a feature, you have to do without it. Or, most likely of all, the company could start publishing buggier and buggier updates, and you’ll have no choice but to use buggier and buggier software.

It seems like a clear choice to me: if the data is anything I value, I must have direct access to it, regardless of what tools I use to manipulate it. The only data I let websites or applications own is data I’d be OK with losing.

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 care about privacy, architecture, etc. They want it to just work (TM). They want us to be able to undo their deletion, find their data when they forget where they moved it.

So it's users pressuring suppliers in the wrong direction, it's not all one way traffic.

(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!). So it makes sense for them to offer a different feature set, and accept that it's not going to be suitable for some people.

Users no more expect vendors to lose their data than they expect banks to lose their money. I suspect we'll eventually end up with some sort of standards body making sure you do backups.

> 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.

> So it's users pressuring suppliers

So may be managing data by product supplier is NOT the wrong direction?

Yeap, it's a 1990s model. I had a discussion with a software salesman... I was explaining to him that, what is valuable is not the software it's the data I will have put in his software in 5 years from now and if I don't have raw access to this data, I don't want his software.

He didn't understand a word.

Oh he most certainly did. Companies don't want to give you data for exactly that reason - if they can convince you to start using their software, you'll quicky be stuck with them.

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 ownership of third-party data back toward the user, personal API/quantified being the most recent. I think the missing link is not the technology, but rather a social movement that promotes the value of data access and ownership. This might be one silver lining to recent data breach and hacking scandals.

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 switched from github organizations to hosted github (more similar to the OP's situation) all of my repos in my personal github account remained intact and my access wasn't affected in any way

Although you can't browse it, you can instruct Evernote to keep a local copy of all your data, allowing you to keep incremental backups. You can find (and change, if you want) the database folder under Tools/Options, General.

I do agree with your other points, although there are significant limitations to using the filesystem for storage in an application like Evernote. Perhaps a good compromise would be to use a publicly available database engine like postgres (although I'm sure they derive advantages from their proprietary format beyond the mere fact that it's proprietary).

This is reason #1 why I like DEVONthink for the Mac. It uses exactly this model. I'm sure equivalents exist on the other platforms, but I'm not all that familiar.

I have been an Evernote Premium user for a long time, and since the company seems to be having a rough time, I recently looked at getting all of my data out of Evernote. What a nightmare.

I loved Evernote. I loved the fact that Phil Libin said he wanted it to be a 100-year company. I don't know all the details, but the fact that he seems to have given up... what a letdown. I'm working on getting my data out. Once I'm done, I think I'm going to let my subscription lapse.

At risk of sounding like an Evernote apologist, I'm going to repeat a question I asked to another commenter elsewhere in this thread:

Why do you consider it a "nightmare" to get your data out of Evernote? You can select one, several, or all of the notes in a notebook and export them in either HTML or XML format, with all metadata (tags, etc.) and embedded media included. That seems pretty good to me, and it's certainly easy. If you wanted something more sophisticated, Evernote on the Mac has exceptionally complete support for AppleScript, so you can code up whatever kind of fancy extraction you need.

I'm not asking to be argumentative; I've always considered Evernote's support for extracting data to be pretty darn good, and clearly superior to many competitive apps/services, so I'm curious to know what additional functionality you would require before you'd say it's not a "nightmare" to extract your information.

I use DEVONthink too for the same reason. The only thing DEVONthink lacks is cross-platform support. It's a pity that it's not available on Linux or Android.

This is a great point. There's an analagous situation in finance: would you rather have a single mutual fund own all your investment money, or do you want a brokerage account with some active management? The latter is definitely more complicated but gives the user more control, accountability, visibility, etc. While it makes sense for a Whole Product to want to hide this complexity and liquidity from the user, any long-term user will very likely want it after they've learned to use the product.

Actually I'd say a large percentage of people would be very well served by a globally diversified index fund for all their equity holdings...

And perhaps the analogy is still useful. I'm ok with that situation because I understand and accept the logic of indexing. If the fund I owned changed their prospectus and decided to start active management, or significantly increased their management fee, or whatever, I could pull my money out and invest it elsewhere. Similarly in software there are definite advantages to having a dedicated steward for a given type of data, but it's much better if there is some way to take your data back should you decide to put it elsewhere.

With Evernote, it is possible to export all your notes in a variety of formats, including XML, which can then be imported into other note taking applications if you wish. So to me, the bare fact that the application controls the data isn't necessarily an issue. What was becoming an issue was the fact that they didn't appear to treat it with sufficient respect. I hope we'll see that start to change now.

Thus... I use https://github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5 for the most vital information. It's more tedious, local (a simple file) and run in a browser.

> is a principle fundamental to Evernote: data owned by an application, rather than data accessed by an application.

Close, its a principle fundamental to modern cloud-based companies.

Offer the cloud storage for free, for 0 privacy and the permission to read, copy, access, and sell your data to third parties

> Close, its a principle fundamental to modern butt-based companies.

> Offer my butt storage for free, for 0 privacy and the permission to read, copy, access, and sell your data to third parties

Moreover, data loss is not a possibility, it's pretty much a certainty, because it's backed straight in the business model. At some point investors need to get their money back, and what better way to do that than have the company acquired? It's such an effective way that a lot of people starting their companies do that hoping that they'll get bought by a big corp. That the product gets subsequently shut down doesn't seem to bother anyone (except the customers, who at this point really should know better than to do business with a startup unless they're prepared for the moment said startup shows them the middle finger and disappears).

Completely agree with this and I think the model of an application that accesses data is the only one I will trust going forward. Great example of this is Scrivener. I can have my files locally stored or in the cloud, but Scrivener just accesses, not owns the files.

And this is why iTunes is a much better software than iPhoto.

>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.

No, you don't sound cynical at all. I think It's perfectly reasonable to think that and it seems to be shaking out that way. It does seem pretty douchey to pontificate about your views on applications and data access in the form of a "this is why I don't use applications of this type" and then launch into an example of exactly what happened to someone who just said "I lost all my data with this service." It's kind of like "no shit. Thanks for telling me after the fact, professor."

> root cause of failures like this is a principle fundamental to Evernote: data owned by an application, rather than data accessed by an application

Not really. It's not like MS Word reading your .doc find can't corrupt it leaving you hanging if you don't have a backup. Catastrophic data loss isn't cured by the "data accessed by an application" model.

At least you can backup files. Applications, not so much... I'd add that data should be stored in a standard open format, so that an application failure won't prevent you to 1. keep your data (because backups) and 2. use your data (because open format)

I recently lost nearly a days writing - but apparently they only do a back-up every 8 hours, and I was off by one (I don't write in Evernote anymore, lesson learned).

They did try to placate with 3 months free (after being a paying customer for years), but I'm just amazed that with the ~$300M of VC they've raised, they still haven't caught up to the real-time sync of Google Docs of 8+ years ago.

Hopefully their new focus (i.e. sync) is aiming to at least match that. I'd have moved by now if I could find something that was both highly cross-platform (Mac/Win/iOS) and lighter (Markdown pretty please).

Somebody here at HN suggested using Zim wiki a while ago http://zim-wiki.org/

I've been using it ever since. It stores data in plain text files (dokuwiki markup) and in addition the folder structure is mirrored in the note hierarchy. Zim is open, cross-platform, can include Latex-formula, and is extendable with plugins written in Python. I really also like that it is a proper desktop application instead of some webapp that changes UX every now and then, usually to worse, and that is dependent on network connection. After learning the keyboard shortcuts it is really a pleasure to use. Five stars * * * * *

I keep my Zim notebooks (separate NB's for Work and Personal things) in Dropbox for easy syncing between two desktops. Other Win7 and other Ubuntu.

edit: Added mention to Latex, as it might be of interest in this crowd.

I used a lot of Evernote as well, but what killed it for me was how slow the mobile client was.

I didn't "switch" as much as I've started (inspired by Luhmann's Zettelkasten) a personal wiki of sorts in markdown files. I've been using 1Writer for iPad (as a separate app from Editorial and iaWriter, where I usually compose text), which already lists the files in a folder on the left-hand side of the screen.

I also have a script on a Linux server that watches for changes in that folder and auto-commits to a local git repo under increasing "version numbers".

instead of dropbox, there's syncthing: https://syncthing.net/

Thank you for the Zim plug. This will meet my needs nicely.

I made the switch to Simplenote, and I've had a great experience so far. The main "sacrifice" is that you can only store plain next.

It was created by Automattic, Matt Mullenweg's company.

Simplenote was actually created by Simperium (YC S10) [1], a company founded by Fred Cheng and Mike Johnston and acquired by Automattic in 2013 [2].

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/simperium

[2] http://simplenote.com/2013/01/24/simplenote-supercharged/

I made the switch to Simplenote

I have a problem committing to a program/site that says:

   it’s all completely free

How can they stay in business? Is their business nothing more than data mining my files? Is that something I want to allow? Is that a long term strategy for viability?

Another vote for Simplenote - does exactly what it says on the tin. In 2-3 years of using it, I had only couple of issues with sync. When I reported them, support was super responsive and the issues were fixed with subsequent updates.

They also offer easy exports of your notes.

If you've never tried, give it a shot - http://simplenote.com

Simplenote is where I keep my plain text notes now (Notational Velocity on Mac and official app on Android). My local copy of notes reside in my Dropbox folder and my (pretty much) entire ~/ is backed up to CrashPlan cloud.

For notes or docs that need diagram etc I use Google Docs. Even my team uses the same (as part of the Google Apps suite).

What I love about Simplenote is that it does what it says - just plain text notes. No gimmicks, no extra load and bells and whistles.

But I have a feeling that they will shut it down soon. They had a paid tier and they removed it some time back. There has hardly been any update I guess and iirc they don't really update their Android app frequently either.

Do they encrypt the notes at client side before sending it their servers? I would love to use a self hosted app that has such a functional and minimal interface and clean sync feature.

> I'd have moved by now if I could find something that was both highly cross-platform (Mac/Win/iOS) and lighter (Markdown pretty please).

I've compromised on OneNote, which isn't lightweight, but has become impressively cross-platform.

I might use OneNote if its search could find text in attachments. But it cannot; it only supports searching the actual text contained in the note itself.

Part of the Evernote value proposition is being able to find things again (although Evernote's search interface is abysmally bad, and offers no way to narrow your search so as not have a huge number of irrelevant matches).

I tried to get back into OneNote last night (after the frustrations brought up by posting in this thread). I appreciate the cross-platform aspect, but I really don't like the interface - especially on desktop. The really weird text-box thing just blows my mind, I just want to write.

I personally have been using git more and more for my note taking. I use RStudio and RMarkdown for my notes and it has been great and easily spread to all my personal devices.

> I'm just amazed that with the ~$300M of VC they've raised, they still haven't caught up to the real-time sync of Google Docs of 8+ years ago.

I don't understand. EverNote has instant sync across devices. If you are using in web browser or PC client then its even real time. (Android one requires you to click "Done" before syncing apparently because it treats the whole note as one giant text area).

I very frequently switch between typing on my desktop or my tablet whenever i leave my desk but have an idea running in my head. Similarly if someone is viewing my note, they get frequent updates as I type

The iOS and Desktop clients do not instant-sync, or I assume they wouldn't both have sync buttons (or a "Synchronize Automatically" preference, that has "Every 5 minutes" as it's most frequent option).

I'm aware of instant-sync in the web client, but typically (especially in this case) prefer desktop clients to web.

In the unfortunate case I referenced above, I spent an entire morning writing in Evernote (Mac desktop). At lunch I had another thought to add, opened Evernote on my phone, and apparently the same note was already open - so it overwrote all the work I set all day to it's earlier state. There was no way to get it back, as it didn't consider it a conflict and it had no backups due to being less than 8 hours (I went through this with their support team). It's a broken product.

Sync shouldn't even need to be one of their goals - it should be a solved problem by now.

The Windows desktop client isn't real time sync at all, it's set to sync every X minutes (configurable) and there's a great big Sync button on the toolbar.

Dropbox with Markdown editors ? They exist on all platforms.

This is why I store all my important writing (mostly fiction, journal entries, etc.) locally, on an external HDD AND Dropbox.

after being a long time user of evernote i switched to moo.do it's not a good tool for writing articles, but rather a mix between note taking and a todo app. your data is stored on your google drive, so you can back it up as you like.

it's free too: http://www.moo.do

Evernote is probably the buggiest "professional" software I've ever used. While I never lost all of my data, I lost a few individual notes, and I lost formatting on my notes (e.g. bullet points/numbers) so frequently that I just resorted to using plaintext/whitespace formatting.

I wanted to create a competitor ages ago using markdown. But in the end I just resorted to using notepad and wunderlist.

I've had too many problems with evernote in the past. Random formatting and data lost. Support always being hopeless. I threw in the towel.

> I lost formatting on my notes (e.g. bullet points/numbers) so frequently that I just resorted to using plaintext/whitespace formatting.

So glad to see that I wasn't the only one. OneNote got the list formatting right in its original version (2003!), yet Evernote has steadfastly refused to do anything about how bad their own implementation is.

That is incredible. I'm sorry that behavior like that exists and that service providers can be so terrible at what they do.

It also sounds like an implied admission, on the part of evernote, of not having working backups ? I would think that they would have found some way any way to get your data back to you given what just happened.

That might just mean that they delete all backups when the account gets deleted for privacy reasons.

Depending on the backup tech, that can be kind of difficult. I can't run arbitrary SQL against the database backups I've got stored in tarsnap. Nor against tape, etc.

For that matter, isn't the (or one) reason for having a backup so that errant deletes don't obliterate everything?

My account once decided to throw away several dozen notes for no good reason (I had deleted a bunch of conflicting changes over several months, and when I emptied the trash, it wiped all the corresponding current notes on the server and all three of my devices). Evernote support couldn't do anything about it.

They also took like two weeks to respond to my problem ticket. I'd submitted it on New Year's Eve, so I anticipated having to wait a day or two, but that was pretty ridiculous.

Thanks for pointing that out. If a company shuts down their account I suppose it's actually a feature that copies of their notebooks be deleted from every employee's system. Though the glitch is when personal notebooks are deleted.

I think a middle ground would be a two step deletion, no?

Step1 : Delete from everyone's machine but keep a backup for X days to allow people to file complaints etc.

Step2 : Delete Backup

That's why I create backups of my Evernote databases regularly. You never know.

This is a hilarious comment coming from a user named "rsync"

rsync operates rsync.net, an online backup company. They have a longstanding professional interest (and expertise) regarding these issues.

he runs rsync.net

Evernote is notoriously bad at keeping notes. http://jasonkincaid.net/2014/01/evernote-the-bug-ridden-elep...

Although nowhere near to your situation, I lost important meeting notes after a conference call. After making some formatting modifications (cut/copy/paste) to organize the notes, I found myself not being able to restore any text by undo-ing some of the inadvertent changes I made. Having been burned by a feature so basic to document editing as Undo, my next steps were basically to export all of my business notes and stop using the service for any work related activities. If not for this incident, I would probably keep using it.

I had a similar experience. After two or three times losing large amounts of work, and finding absolutely no way to get back to an older revision in the free version, I stopped using the product. I may have gone to the premium service if it hadn't been so buggy.

I've had the same experience. If they'd literally done nothing but make sure the product doesn't lose data in the last two years since they last CEO announced a refocus on quality they'd be in a much better spot. With people's data you don't really get a second chance. Evernote seems to treat dataloss as "well, you know, it's only a couple of kbytes we lost of yours" - while to the customer what they lost has disproportionately more value than the amount implies.

As for me, I'm now a lifer anti-customer of Evernote.

Once my Evernote underwent a dramatic sync error, resulting in duplicates of all my notes. Evernote support's only help was to suggest I use Time Machine to recreate my notebook. They couldn't move the notebook back in time or anything like that.

That's horrid. This is exactly the kind of thing Evernote should be prioritizing above all else.

It is a good example of why it's so important to keep your own incremental backups though. I wouldn't be comfortable relying on EN as much as I do if I didn't sync and back up my entire note store. (Similarly, although I trust Google's reliability far more, I still keep and back up a local sync of my email.)

While it sounds excessive that a company has so many worldwide offices to even have 3 to close, good luck having them focus on important problems with their software if any of those 47 layoffs included developers. This kind of fatal flaw that can result in data loss makes it sound like they prioritize new features and marketing above the product itself.

Hi Jason -

I work at Evernote and would like to look at your support ticket with our management team to figure out what happened. Will you please let me know your ticket number?

Thanks in advance. Please know that we're here to help.

What I end up doing is storing my evernote project folder in dropbox. Funny enough evernote detects this and warns me, but I know dropbox won't loose my files.

Does this imply they do not have backups? Or did they offer some other explanation?

The reasoning I lost the data was actually a permissions issue, I think. I was an individual person, paying a Premium subscription and when the company I worked for signed up something happened to where they owned my notebooks. The company stopped using it, there went my stuff too.

This doesn't help OP but I am new to evernote and naively excited about it. One thing I like about it is that I can export my notebooks to an XML text format that contains the encoded images. So it seems to me that I can put my notebooks into git and not worry about losing anything. This thread is making me think I should investigate whether that is automatable; I was assuming it would be.

> So it seems to me that I can put my notebooks into git and not worry about losing anything

most of the point of paying for evernote is they should remove the worry about losing anything. Their entire point for being is to record your notes. And keep them safe and accessible. If there's a statistically noticeable chance that they will lose some or all of your data, they have no substantive value.

I disagree. That's not the attraction for me. The attraction for me (personally) is that they have nice image capture and processing software that allows me to link diagrams and math from my paper notebooks to electronic documents with a quick picture taken on my phone. They're a private corporation and not one that is too large to fail; I wouldn't rely on them to not lose my data, I would use something like git for that.

Exactly. A big part of Evernote's appeal to me was that, synced across three devices and the cloud, my data would be safe even if my house burned down.

Then Evernote decided to delete several dozen of my notes from their server, and helpfully synced that change to all my devices.

I'm currently looking for a replacement that suits my needs. Microsoft OneNote looks promising, now that it has Mac/Android support.

This is insane. Although I believe Evernote is one of the few products that allow you to export your data.

Exporting your Dropbox data is just dragging your files out of the dropbox folder or just turning off synching. I mean it doesn't include your event log or old stuff and you have to have separate client applications for the things Evernote does (like web clippings etc) but yeah, Dropbox. I have not lost any data with it and I was able to recover data I did lose through their amazing deleted item retrieval tool.

Any product that doesn't allow you to export your data is broken.

how do you export? Last time I checked I could only export individual notes, which is obviously not a working solution given that I have thousands of notes.

In the desktop app, select all notes, click export, or... right click on "Notebooks", select export.

It lets you export in ENEX format, which is fully re-importable back to Evernote, or as HTML web pages.

Out of curiousity, What made you choose Evernote over Google Drive? Doesn't Google Drive offer the same features? I haven't used Evernote and use Google docs to store my notes instead.

honestly it was mostly presentation. Evernote has an interface that made it easy for me to take notes, update, attach pictures, store all of those notes in a notebook.

GD feels just like a filesystem to me. At that time. Now I actually use GD for this.

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.

I haven't experienced this so far but after reading about your experience, I just took backup of my evernotes.

CloudHQ will migrate to Google Drive, Dropbox or etc. for free.

> Evernote’s strength is in its core: notes, sync, and search. That’s where we’re going to focus.

Well, like many others, I've been wishing Evernote would drop all the auxiliary stuff and focus on their core product. Hopefully that's exactly what will now happen. Evernote has become an absolutely critical part of my life. Even though I use it for business (along with everything else) though, I have no use for the majority of the new features they've added over the past few years. Of course, not every feature will be useful to everyone, and just because I don't use something doesn't mean it shouldn't exist. However, when you see significant bugs languish for years while niche features get priority, it suggests a problem. I really hope this signifies a change in direction (as opposed to a milestone in the current, downward, one).

It would also be a huge plus if it didn't take 5 seconds to load every time I opened the app. Not sure how a company with so many competitors can survive long-term with its product in such a state.

Agreed; Google Keep has become my preference for immediate note taking. I think a major factor in Evernote's long-term survival is the friction of switching to a competitor (in conjunction with getting a lot of early traction with power-users).

I'll use Keep for everything the moment they add attachments, rich text and a clipper. It's already pretty close to what I need..

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

What I find missing is a native Windows client. For me, "immediate" note taking means that I just hit ctrl-alt-N (or click Evernote icon in a tray), and I am immediately writing. In Google Keep, you basically need to visit a webpage, which is just not immediate. Or you use it only on mobile device?

I've gone the other way (Keep to Evernote). I need a cross platform solution, and with any significant amount of data the Keep webapp is practically unusable on my iPad. If they had released a native iOS version, I probably wouldn't have switched.

I recently switched from Android to iOS, and I deeply miss Keep.

Everything about Evernote seems to get slower and slower; I hardly use it at all anymore for that reason. Even the browser plugin to save webpages is glacial, and that was a big reason I started with Evernote in the first place.

"It's traveling to space. Give it time" - LCK

When their competitors can be 5x faster while still traveling to space that's not so hot.

(And it doesn't actually travel to space unless you're on a satellite connection.)

More often than it should. This is a huge problem with current companies and their products - they depend too much on the Internet connection, because a combination of lazy (or deadline-pressured) authors and executives trying to monetize absolutely anything.

The newest version of the Android app is actually a huge improvement here. It's now possible to launch a quick note from the desktop basically instantaneously. (It probably averages 0.3 seconds on my Galaxy S6.) Hopefully a sign of things to come.

What is the auxiliary stuff that they've dropped? (or will drop/reduce emphasis on)

Genuinely curious. I've noted that they seem to have multiple apps in the AppStore doing similar things.

You know, auxiliary stuff like business socks.

https://www.evernote.com/market/feature/socks-en_CA?sku=SOCK...

Unbelievable.

Too much VC money sloshing around.

I know that there's a lot of groupthink in the VC community, and so CEOs aren't always selected strictly on merit. But even I, with no executive experience whatsoever, would know not to OK something like that.

As Saint Steven once put it:

   I'm actually as proud of the things
   we haven't done as the things I have done.
   Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.

Why didn't this dialog take place in a board meeting?

   CEO: thanks for the hundreds of millions of
   dollars you've invested in us. Here's something
   new we've done. We're putting your money
   to good use.

        WE HAVE SOCKS FOR SALE!!!

   non-spineless Board of Directors:
   That's great.
   Let's all just go back to your office and help you
   clean out your desk. Then we'll escort you out of
   the building and the rest of us will reconvene to
   discuss finding a better steward for the hundreds
   of millions of dollars we've given you.

Edit: just to emphasize, the quote above was from Jobs discussing focus: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/629613-people-think-focus-me...

IMO startups that aren't making money and that keep having to do rounds of financing need to, most of all, FOCUS. Evernote board should be chanting: FOCUS! FOCUS! FOCUS!

Oh my god, this has to be a joke. The lines "We've got you covered" and "It's your business" are too bad to be real.

I'm hoping they're dropping the idea of chat. Spending time on that really never made much sense me when their core product is so strong but badly needs some features to better align with modern tech trends such as improved plain text and markdown support.

> ... markdown support

Yes, 1000 times yes! I so wish I could author in Evernote using markdown. Getting any sort of rich text done in a note is extremely cumbersome in Evernote, lists for instance.

There was a point in 2013 when if you weren't doing something related to messaging and chat, you couldn't be one of the cool startup kids

I recently switch to jotterpad + dropbox for this reason. Plus, now I can quickly edit my notes on PC with vim.

I don't know what they've dropped, but a few auxiliary features I personally don't use are Skitch, Hello, and Work Chat. I'm sure some people do use them (although I expect few compared to the core product). But everyone uses the editor, and there are significant bugs there that have literally gone unfixed for years. That said, some have been fixed in the past couple months, which is part of why I'm hopeful about this new direction.

Personally skitch is far more important to me than Evernote itself. If they killed off that app I'd be gone in a heartbeat.

I use Scannable _extensively_. Being able to search the text in handwritten documents and whiteboards - without losing the original document to some ridiculous OCR conversion - is absolutely gold. Plain text notes are somewhat less important for me, although I use them a lot too.

I don't care one whit about chat.

I believe they got rid of their Food app recently. I'd be so grateful if they ditched Chat (or at least gave options to remove it from all platforms) and accepted that even if we it for work, some of it use it in a personal capacity that does not benefit from social aspects at all.

I never understood the food app. I figured it was a case of the founder taking "dogfooding" a bit too literally.

I wonder if they're experiencing feature creep because they've satisfied users of the core features. I use a program called Devonthink Pro according to this method: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/0002... and in some respects my use hasn't changed that much. I use syncing features and some other pieces, and maybe the engine has gotten a little better over time, but mostly I do what I did with it 10 years ago.

I wrote a little more about DTP here: http://jakeseliger.com/2010/11/12/scrivener-or-devonthink-pr... , though I understand that some people use Evernote differently than DTP.

> I wonder if they're experiencing feature creep because they've satisfied users of the core features.

Except for a native linux client :(

I absolutely agree - the core of evernote is what I like and it needs more attention. Usability, performance, ...

But it looks like they found out themselves, eventually... ;)

Evernote is a note taking app in 2015. While slack and hipchat are somewhat iconoclastic, they have network affects and boost productivity. Evernote is competing with apple notes, google docs, whatever microsoft has, every password keeping app, a notebook, a text editor and using a blog. This is something that will likely happen to dropbox and box. You provide storage. Simple math will provide you with the cost of storage in 5 years and it is not a lot. Further, similar to evernote, it solved a problem that had a lot of friction and was novel a few years ago, but is standard now.

Syncing. This is a default piece of all browsers, the 2 main operating systems win/os x, and comes standard on most phones. This is like the browser, you can have it for free so you stay in our ecosystem. Mega GIVES you 50GB of storage completely free NOW, and it is likely more secure. I don't know enterprise as well as I know consumer, but at some point I would imagine the choice is between buying a few SSDs and having an internal server, or setting up your own secure system via VPN. There can't be much room for this.

Microsoft has OneNote, which might be a good cautionary tale in this area. OneNote was once the king of note taking, like back in 2003, and it's still a great product. But Microsoft focused too much on the Business market, I think, dropping OneNote from the Office Home packages, and that kind of killed it outside of the corp world.

OneNote is now completely free and available on iOS as well (where it has a full 5-star rating). As much I love Evernote, it's going to be an uphill battle for them. (And not to mention the handwriting experience and integration with the Surface Pen - which are killer features for students)

I was totally unaware of OneNote until it came with Windows 7 Enterprise at my first corporate job. I couldn't believe how great it was (at least on desktop), but I was too deep into Evernote by that point to make the switch.

I've only really known about OneNote since it came bundled with Windows 8/on the Surface RT I got at work.

It seems like a fairly good product, although I really only use it for bookmarking tabs that Chrome seems to lose when it crashes/updates itself and nukes the "recently closed tabs" list.

Isn't OneNote still popular in education, like students taking notes in class?

? OneNote has always been in the Office Home & Students version, hasn't it? It's also part of Office 365.

I love what OneNote can do, the ability to record meeting video or capture a whiteboard talk with a smart board is magical. But I can't use it day to day.

Managing notebooks, tabs and pages is a real pain. I end up with a sprawling OneNote notebook that gets lost in the sprawl of OneDrive/SharePoint.

How do you mean? According to Wikipedia OneNote was launched in 2003, and has been part of the Home and Student editions of Office 2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016.

OneNote is a great MS product that they've totally failed to market. My wife uses it extensively; the drawing capture features integrate nicely with the Surface.

My working theory regarding OneNote is that it is a peculiarity of Australians. The only people I know that use it are Australian so maybe they have it on the national curriculum there instead of something like 'spelling'.

I think that a single-purpose app or service can survive in a world full of multi-featured competitors, but it needs to be insanely good at what it does in order to do so. Evernote is not insanely good at notetaking, and therein lies the problem.

Agreed, but it is insanely better than anything else I've ever tried.

(I haven't tried that many things, but really I don't know of any decent competitor that runs well on multiple platforms, and does the basic things I need - which is text notes, other file types, and ability to tag and put into a notebook. And on a native app).

Your thesis is correct (single purpose app can survive in a world full of multi-featured competitors by being insanely good at one thing). But I disagree with your interpretation. Evernote is THE multi-featured competitor in notetaking arena. It does too many things, each of them in mediocre manner. Then comes all the "single-purpose apps that are insanely good at one thing only" which disrupt Evernote. Think of Instapaper (Saving webpages), Simplenote (Text syncing), All kinds of TODO apps, they all are good at one thing and do it well. That's why Evernote is not doing well.

MEGA might not be safe anymore. Kim Dotcom doesn't work there, there was a hostile takeover.

Dropbox must have many more corp customers than evernote, no?

I am sure. However, like evernote the difficult problem they solved several years ago is no longer difficult, but quite easy and become much more cheap. Couple that with security and privacy risks and the value proposition changes quickly.

Maybe they are gearing up for a google merger or something. They are doing their mailbox app which looks cool and integrates storage and syncing. However, once again

1. Why would I use a mail client that only interfaces with gmail and outlook?

2. What is the point of the sync, this is default by most mail providers and clients?

3. Why would I want mail storage? I actually don't know what my mailbox limit is, but I certainly would not want to have the amount of .txt documents that could fill that up. Also, this is basic functionality. You can't pull me on your platform, google has the users you want and are better positioned, I still don't understand how you make money as a company.

The problem with Evernote is with the way they treat data. I found a really interesting guide hosted on Evernote[1] and I tried to download it. But no, I couldn't, because, they took the pains to block someone from downloading their notebooks and made my life so difficult in the end that I not only gave up on the conversion, but also stopped being their customer. I couldn't even print the damn thing! Ironically, they called it a shared notebook. What a joke!

I refuse to stop paying for any service that doesn't believe in open sharing through widely accepted/popular formats. The internet is alive today only because people believe in sharing information, not holding it back behind such a walled garden.

I refuse to support such companies. Not in 2015 atleast.

[1]This is the notebook in question and mind you, it's a "Shared" notebook: https://www.evernote.com/pub/contentblueprint/thecontentmark...

Ever since I left Evernote, I created a private Wordpress blog and used their sharing bookmark to store notes, snippets and everything else.

I also use Google docs and Apple Notes app for other kinds of data and it has served me well. I understand this wouldn't fit everyone's bill, but it definitely fit mine.

So, adios Evernote! Hope someone replaces you soon!

> I refuse to stop paying

I'm not sure you meant that

If you've got an Evernote account, rename that notebook and sync your account. I clicked on the above link, renamed it, then synced in the desktop app. It was now my notebook. I then was able to export it. (That said, I'm leaving Evernote.)

businessinsider had a great article on evernote here, "Evernote, the first dead unicorn", which really foreshadowed this: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/evernote-the-first-dead-un...

My prediction, the next dead unicorn: Dropbox

They are similar in that they haven't made anything note worthy in a while and their main product is really just a feature of bigger companies apps and services.

Personally, I don't want them to make anything noteworthy. I want them to make something subtle, unobtrusive, and as reliable as gravity. I've been using them 3 or 4 years now and as far as I'm concerned, they're my favorite vendor.

Google and Amazon keep screwing with things because they have a complicated global-dominance ecosystem that they're trying to build. I don't trust them with my files. But Dropbox keeps doing what they're doing with only modest, incremental improvements (that gradually add up). As long as they keep things solid, I'll keep using and recommending them.

I tried Google Drive when it was launched. Used it a lot, but had tons of syncing issues. I ended up losing quite a bit of data.

Switched to Dropbox and haven't had a single sync issue since.

You're right that it's a service that is ridiculously simple in what it does, but right now, I can't imagine moving my 10GB+ of data to another platform.

The issue I have with Dropbox is that their usage / pricing model is totally broken. If someone shares their folder with me, it shouldn't eat into my storage allocation.

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)

I'm curious: why do you feel Dropbox needs to make something new and noteworthy? Why can't it just stick to its knitting, and continue to offer something that works and people find valuable?

Another prediction: Twitter.

2k+ engineers on staff without notable improvements to the core user-facing product in a while.

Declining signups, declining engagement.

Nobody stepping into the permanent CEO role.

I don't see how this ends well.

DB is too big to fail. They are just everywhere at this point; I have rarely seen a technology that has managed to find itself into every corner of every industry, and be used by professionals at every technical-level. I have experienced the LEAST technical people asking me to use Dropbox. Dropbox is like if Email was owned by one company.

Literally the only thing that keeps me paying for Dropbox, instead of completely abandoning it for OneDrive, is that OneDrive doesn't have a Linux client. And much of the OneDrive functionality (for example, the photo organiser) is a hell of a lot better.

I'm an edge case, and the case (Linux support) doesn't bode well for DropBox.

These predictions are fun. Is it time for FC 2.0? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

My favourite question to ask of start-ups: "have you built a product or a feature?"

And they royally fucked up Mailbox after buying it.

That article generated a lot of discussion on HN a couple of weeks ago, which can be found here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10218915

(Note: The BusinessInsider article was a re-publication of the original on syrah.co.)

thank you for noticing! we are currently back on HN with the Startup L. Jackson post so this was weird timing

I believe Groupon is the first dead Unicorn

As I understand the definition that people have been bandying about, Groupon can't be a dead unicorn because they managed to go public. To be a Unicorn you have to be a privately held and venture backed company with a valuation (from your investors) of over $1B.)

While GroupOn went public, and continues to this day, just as Zynga did.

Groupon is still worth a couple of billion despite the beating it's taken from investors. Its revenue and EBITDA have consistently climbed in each year since going public, and there is plenty of cash on hand without a single cent of debt.

As usual, the Motley Fool's analysis is excellent: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/04/07/bull-vs-bea...

GRPN is down nearly 46% since that was written...

Groupon still has a $2.3B market cap.

My vote is for Fab, which went from $1B to effectively $0.

The public markets [1] would disagree.

[1] https://www.google.com/?q=GRPN

How are you disagreeing? GRPN is at like 15% of where it opened.

That unicorn looks more like an elephant, but I'm no expert.

In the last 5 years I've accumulated some 8 000 notes in Evernote, which I would love to move to a safer platform/format in light of recent evidence of data loss and speculation concerning Evernote's longevity. What are the alternatives to organizing this second brain/memory?

50% are < 1000 words long texts written by me, transcribed from an audio/video/paper source or saved/clipped/copypasted from elsewhere

20% complete webpages or complete articles deemed important enough to save a copy for later 10% graphics, annotated images and PDFs 10% oneliners and quotes 10% todo-lists, task lists, shopping lists, etc.

Every new piece of information I have been exposed to and deemed important enough to return to later has gone into my Evernote inbox, from where it would be weekly sorted into an appropriate notebook by subject, life area, etc. Most important ones are tagged for regular review. Everything else gets some regular dedicated random browsing time, and is often discovered in research when preparing presentations, writing or thinking about any particular topic. There are 80+ notebooks in 10 sections.

Organizing this corpus efficiently and engaging with it with an appropriate interface would effectively be a multiplier for the ability to utilize knowledge and experience. Interacting with such data accumulated over decades through a combined voice assistant / mind map / dashboard / big screen (Microsoft Surface style) is a futuristic idea of knowledge work - the only question is whether there is a large enough consumer user base for such an infovore/generalist/researcher approach to information.

While I think OneNote is a superior product to Evernote, its organization abilities leaves much to be desired. For instance once you get more than like 10-15 (depending on resolution) pages within a second you now have to scroll and its a tiny list. More than, say, 2 sections on mobile means horizontal scrolling. It's all awkward and cumbersome.

But I have yet to find another product that is better than Evernote and OneNote or even just a single, other product better than Evernote. if you find one let me know. I love my OneNote but the organization drives me nuts (I love the tagging abilities in Evernote).

Ah whereas I find organisation in Evernote not to work. The tagging feature (on Windows at least) is buggy, and I often end up with half-word tags; they can also be 'lost' before the note syncs. I have notebooks full of disorganised information which I can't find -- this is what I view as Evernote's biggest weakness.

Fair enough; when I used Evernote I subscribed to the "tag everything" way of organizing stuff which worked fairly okay but yeah the interface even on Mac OS X is very buggy. I couldn't consistently create nested tags and tag nesting is a UI only feature; there is no actual hierarchy that can be searched for which is immensely disappointing.

See the "OneNote Bulk" Evernote-to-OneNote migration utility mentioned at http://www.thetechchat.com/2014/09/05/how-to-convert-notes-f...

EDIT 1: PayPal and LinkedIn indicate that the migration app's developer is in China. [1] That initially gave me pause about using the app --- who knows where my information might end up? --- but then I'm guessing that Chinese hackers seeking to steal confidential information aren't likely to be so open about being in China, nor to charge $30 for the app. (Of course, that too could all be part of the evil hackers' cover story, right?)

EDIT 2: I just used the app to migrate 6,500-plus notes from Evernote to OneNote as a test. It seemed to work flawlessly. (My suggestion is to use Evernote's export facility on each EN notebook in turn to create a separate export file; then set up OneNote sections corresponding to each EN Notebook; then use the OneNote Bulk app to import each EN notebook's export file into the corresponding ON section.) I'm still pondering whether to make a permanent switch.

[1] https://cn.linkedin.com/pub/james-linton/50/82/9a

Correction: It's "OneNote Batch" not Bulk.

So this is not at all the cheapest option, but if you have a Synology NAS (which are just absolutely fantastic, imho), you can use Note Station. It's very much like Evernote in terms of design and capabilities (though still young), and it has a very straight-forward importer for Evernote notes. I use it as a backup for Evernote. Note Station has mobile apps and web clipper extensions for the browser as well.

Since this resides on your Synology, it's not stored in a cloud service. Depending on your viewpoint, this can be a pro or a con. It also doesn't have a native app, and I have no idea how it does with 8,000 notes.

I do know they're continuing to update it, and I truly hope they add features like Markdown support. I personally use Evernote still (and using Alternote for the actual note taking part), but could see myself switching if Evernote ends up losing my notes or something.

Note Station isnt half bad at all, and has a very similar layout (almost exactly like evernote!) so its easily to pick up. has a web clipper. its a bit slow at times though but so is the web version of evernote as well. not that they ever will, but if synology ever made a desktop note station app id be sold.

In my opinion OneNote is by far better than anything else out there.

Firstly, make sure you regularly Export from your Evernote all Notes and back that up to somewhere cheap like Amazon S3 / Glacier

Hmm, I wonder if something based around Github's Gist service would be nice...

I was a big fan & paying customer of Evernote until they lost my data and then blamed me for syncing from two devices.

I started out with Evernote, but had issues with multi-device sync (I think that when faced with anything that even remotely resembled a conflict it would just duplicate the note). Actually started using OneNote and have been very happy with it!

same thing.

even had the audacity to keep charging me

I have recently moved to Quiver. Its user interface is very similar to Evernote. But it has support for Latex, code highlighting, and markdown! In addition, you can specify the location of library as a Dropbox folder, where data is written in JSON. Here is the data format https://github.com/HappenApps/Quiver/wiki/Quiver-Data-Format

Lack of Latex support, being able to export raw data easily, and long startup time which renders notes unaccessible are my three problems with Evernote. These problems don't exist with Quiver.

http://happenapps.com/#quiver

PS no relationship with either Quiver or Evernote

It looks exacly like the kind of tool I have been looking for for years, albeit for linux/windows

http://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/

I've used it for a couple of years, it's excellent and insanely quick once you learn all the keys plus you can just dump the database to Dropbox and have easy syncing.

No mobile client so I use other stuff for that (Wunderlist is my favourite on Android) but for work stuff/projects it's spot on.

Evernote's former CEO promised to focus on core features last year[0]. After 18 months with no improvements, the new CEO makes the same promise of focusing on core features. Seems like a sinking ship to me.

[0] https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2014/01/04/on-software-qualit...

I wish they would ditch the business focus and return to plain old "remember everything".

Who on earth needs features like "work chat"?

Half the comments here are "you can't just be a 'feature' or you'll get replaced by google/apple/MS" and the other half are "why are they trying to expand beyond the core feature?" Makes me glad I'm no CEO.

>Who on earth needs features like "work chat"?

They want to create a network effect to justify their valuation.

Otherwise it's just a competitor to OneNote, and why is that worth a billion dollars.

Couldn't agree more. I remember when I first started using Evernote, the FAQs specifically said "you can't share your notes, that's not the point". Now it's all social and businessy, but I just want an easy and private way to organise my stuff!

> Couldn't agree more. I remember when I first started using Evernote, the FAQs specifically said "you can't share your notes, that's not the point". Now it's all social and businessy, but I just want an easy and private way to organise my stuff!

This[1] article makes the point that they realized they needed business users to make money, and they were trying to appeal to them.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com.au/evernote-the-first-dead-un...

Seconded. They pushed work chat pretty hard... Given what the CEO letter mentioned about product focus, I wonder if it's the employees that worked on that that are being let go

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.)

I use Workflowy for easy cloud synchronization, great mobile apps (so I can quickly pull up a shopping list I created at my work PC) and generally the way the "infinite outline" model suits my mental organization. I'd be genuinely curious to the extent that some/all of these could meet some/all of these requirement, but Workflowy is so well designed and completely reliable that I haven't been particularly tempted to look around.

For me it was:

1. a similar interface across all platforms with similar features and behavior (android vs desktop text editing is a very different experience)

2. tagging/enhanced search

3. hyperlinks to other nodes and the Internet. This is incredibly powerful to me for nodes that are relevant in multiple contexts. You can put copy/paste the URL of any node into any other and viola, workflowy symlinks!

4. FOCUS. I have ~15k lines of notes in workfowy, but am still able to "zoom in" and focus on the content of just one note. That is super powerful for my productivity. A text editor with 16 spaces of indent and squished text to the right just does not do that for me. In fact, that will probably stress me out more.

Workflowy is a really really cool tool. It totally hits the sweet spot for the way I conduct my day to day work in terms of a todo list which is infinitely nestable, but also focusable, so I can keep track of where I am even on a long yak-shave.

I don't really like it for free-form text since it is list-oriented, but it's taken a surprising chunk out of what I used to keep in nvALT and OmniFocus.

We made something similar to Workflowy called Dynalist (https://dynalist.io/), there's a live demo you can try at https://dynalist.io/demo (no signup required).

We made this because Workflowy has a lot of things that we thought we could improve, and they're kinda slow in development, but that's another story.

Great addition to the workflowy style ecosystem. I will definitely keep an eye on this one. When you plan OPML import support?

Just tried workflowy. I really love the way that they guide you through the demo, they are onboarding a potential user in the demo! What a great concept.

Just tried it and it looks really cool. I wonder why I haven't heard of it before.

Maybe now they'll fix sync and iPhone editing? I've pretty much stopped using Evernote because the whole point was universally synced notes and todo lists but every time I would edit something on my iPhone I both had to deal with the formatting bugs in the iPhone editor AND the very high likelihood I'd end up with a "Conflicting Modifications" regardless of how many times I clicked sync.

As a paying customer it's been very frustrating to see "business" features like note sharing and chat consuming valuable resources while the reason I bought the product, managing notes and todo lists, becomes increasing unusable.

> This team has achieved three incredible feats: they’ve created one of the most important productivity tools in history...

That's a very, very bold statement...

Yeah really, ease up there buddy. How about the steam engine, the cotton gin, the printing press, the computer, etc. I would argue more important than Evernote.

I know that it is the common vernacular, but you didn't let them go, you fired them. Surely they would prefer to not go and continue to pay their mortgage.

I'm sure it wasn't easy to fire them, but don't try and make the situation rosey. The folks who decided on the direction of the company decided wrong and now they have to fire the people who executed those decision.

Edit: Would you all prefer the word "Terminated"?

It's more than common vernacular in English.

"Fired" implies wrong-doing on their part.

"Laid off" or "let them go" means the company couldn't afford to pay them, or didn't need them anymore. It leaves no black mark against their name.

"Fir[ing]" an employee suggests they did something wrong. These 47 people did nothing wrong outside of working on a product or products that are no longer relevant to Evernote.

I think it's the opposite. Layoffs are when mgmt is at fault. Firings are when the employees are at fault.

"Fired" = "let go because the employee did something to deserve it" "Let go" doesn't not have the same meaning.

Being laid off and being fired are not the same thing.

"Fired" or "terminated" tends to imply for cause which is something different from what's happening here. I'd prefer "laid off", but I think "let go" is pretty unambiguous.

The dictionary agrees with you. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fired?s=t

What were the directions/products that have now been discontinued?

"I was removed from evernote"

Bullet lists - I literally left this app for One Note because Evernote COULD NOT properly handle bullet lists. The following is not my post but as of my time of leaving the app, you STILL couldn't properly manage a bullet list. There are dozens of posts asking for bullet lists to be fixed.

I used 5% of the overall features - all I want is to take notes and have them indexed. There was so much bloat and I couldn't make a proper bullet list, so I had no choice to switch. I never understood why people paid for this app.

https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/67060-list-functionali...

For indexed bullet list you should try Dynalist, demo here: https://dynalist.io/demo

Ah, the death of a unicorn. The operational end is doing fine: "Our paid subscription growth is very strong and almost entirely organic; the number of new paid subscribers is 40% higher than this time last year." But the hype has faded, the $1bn valuation is down, and there's no greater fool available to fund them.

This is a problem with too much funding. You have to pay off the investors, which requires rapid growth, which often requires buying market share at a loss.

"Making great products means making difficult decisions," says Evernote CEO Phil Libin. "Our choice was between great user experience, and new features. We are proud to announce that our next release will have many new and exciting features."

I've been a stalwart supporter of Evernote for quite some time now. I've pushed through when feeling like the platform got slower and slower as time went by. I pushed through when it felt like their focus was scattered, like the core offering was being surpassed by other platforms.

Two months ago I pretty much decided 'ok you know what. This is it' after waiting for 25 seconds to get a note back that then turned out to be mysteriously 'missing'.

It happens, right. I get it. And I got it back with some support. But the focus wasn't there, and the platform got old.

Wind the clock back a year and a half (maybe two?) and Evernote was unstoppable compared to the competition.

Now? It's stale. Slow. Predictable and uninspiring.

While reading letters of layoffs is almost always a depressing thing, I sincerely hope that the 'focus' which they speak of is real. That everything, and I mean everything, gets dropped except making the core product as amazing as it once was.

If they do that, I'll come back in a heartbeat. I'll come back with dollar bills.

I got faith Evernote. Come back to the light.

I switched to OneNote very recently, and the biggest reason was that I was fundamentally fed up with all the extraneous features:

http://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2015/08/16/1800#onenote-to-ru...

Anyone know which offices? How many employees does Evernote have? Were layoffs mostly from closed offices?

Edit: the Business Insider article (which maybe should be retained as the link?) has some of the information: 13% of workforce let go. Taiwan, Singapore, and Moscow offices closing. I couldn't tell if the 47 were from these offices mostly. I wouldn't think a note-taking app/website would need to be too dispersed around the world.

Alternote is what the official Evernote client should been. It's the only thing that keeps me on Evernote, since the official client is horrible and slow.

Let's hope Evernote stops messing around with useless features like "Work Chat" and start improving their clients instead. It's kinda silly that a third party can make a client vastly better and more pleasant to use than the official one.

http://alternoteapp.com/

If anyone is looking for a possible alternative for notetaking that is not OneNote, I like nvAlt: http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

I have exported from evernote and moved to nvAlt and gone back again...

It takes a little work to set it up to sync to mobile but it is doable with dropbox.

It does not have the same 'notebook' concept that evernote does, but that might not matter to you.

"Evernote, The First Dead Unicorn" https://syrah.co/joshdickson40/55e1beac15970d6c01395d9d

great article! ;)

(Sorry for posting off-topic but I know you wrote the syrah platform and I can't find an email address for you)

Could you please remove this bit of CSS. I'd like to be able to see my scrollbar:

   body::-webkit-scrollbar {
     width: 0!important;
   }

I've founded a startup that wants to tackle the digital notebook and save-for-later problem, for any content - not just web stuff. What's your wish list for your ideal notebook?

Flexible structure (notebooks > sub-notebooks > notes), notebook level encryption, real-time sync, widely cross-platform, images (with light annotation), markdown editing, zoom text (cmd/ctr-+), light-weight/fast, fantastic search, no tags. I'd like to share a notebook or make a note public, no chat. I will pay anything.

Desktop and mobile clients for all major platforms (including Linux, which most note taking tools don't support), markdown editing, possibility to backup to a local drive, Android widgets.

I like something that I can buy and host myself so that when the over-valued company decides to stop making it I can still use it. Then again, I'm probably not a target user base for somebody looking for the next big thing.

Wow that's rough. Taiwan is in the middle of a Typhoon lashing. Hope the people in their Taiwan office is doing ok through this traumatic event - at a time when most would be relying on their business life to carry them through the physical disasters.

I cannot help but think about the article last week about WhatsApp needing only 50 engineers for over 900M users. Evernote just let go that many people and their software is bug-ridden next to WhatsApp. Seriously, what do all of these engineers do?

Just started using Evernote after a coworker shared a note with me the other day.

After years of using notepad, notepad++, sublime text, and now atom, I feel like the plaintext experience is severely lacking.

Select all the text in a note, mark as plain text, copy something from any site, paste, formatting is ignored. Paste with source formatting should be the exception, not the norm.

The lack of headers and other basic formatting options is also frustrating. Wordpress does a better job with it's editor... and it's a web app!

I'm a very casual Evernote user; I only use the free version, every few months, to sync basic things (e.g., shopping lists, or directions) between my desktop and phone.

A few months ago, I noticed that there were suddenly lots of ads within Evernote, encouraging me to upgrade to the paid version. I'm not complaining, since they need to make money, but it did strike me as being more aggressive than before. Now I understand what was (is) happening.

I have the same feeling with you at the moment(s) every time I open Evernote it prompts to ask you to upgrade.

I'm a long-time evernote premium customer who is saddened but not even slightly surprised by this.

I firmly believe that Evernote raised too much money, at far too high of a valuation, and they fucked themselves. They did not have the product and market to justify a $1B valuation. They just didn't. They bet huge on their ability to invent whole new markets that sound like they're related to evernote, but aren't, really. And unsurprisingly, that didn't pan out.

Now the core product has been stagnant for years; gaining "features" like work chat which were clearly dreamt up in a silo, completely disconnected from the market's needs. And now the troops will pay for management's complete and total fucking incompetence. And yes, I know one CEO is gone, but the new CEO is an absolute fucking joke as well.

And long-time customers like me... we keep hoping that OneNote or some similar product will add an "Import from Evernote" button. So that we can escape this mismanaged, formerly great product.

Why do you say the new CEO is a joke?

Incidentally, speaking of recent changes - one thing I have noticed over the past few months are constant reminders and emails to "Upgrade to Premium". I wonder if this was the immediate focus of the new CEO: to convert free customers to paying. After all, an important point was stressed in the CEO's letter - that their paying subscriber count has increased by 40% YOY.

Why do you say the new CEO is a joke? Just curious.. he hasn't been around long enough to pass judgement on, I wouldn't think?

I think why news of layoffs is so disconcerting is that it can be really, really hard to differentiate between what's fat and what's muscle in the business. A lot of "cost centers" like development end up meaning a lot to brand perceptions, which isn't valued correctly in the traditional P&L hierarchy and can have a significant time lag.

From my perspective (as a UX'er). I'm seeing more and more projects & organisations need a 'vision' of what the product should be to help them focus product/feature efforts. There seems to be an underlying 'enabling' of superfluous dev effort due to the proliferation & ease of user of stacks/libraries/platforms.

More so, VC funding and the push to become highly valued (gotta win that unicorn lottery) drives scope and feature bloat. Every company has to grow, grow grow. Every product has to expand and scale up until it's everything to all people.

Compare and contrast this with, say, craigslist, which still only has a few dozen employees. There's nothing wrong with keeping a product tightly scoped and keeping a business highly efficient and consistently profitable year after year, decade after decade. Maybe you don't get to ride the unicorn train, but maybe instead you get to work on something that you own (or own a big part of) and can enjoy your job consistently.

I personally struggle with Evernote - not in the utilization aspect as I use it multiple times a week, but rather, on its lack of focus on addressing & fixing the features its users really need & want: i.e code formatting, inconsistencies between formats across mobile, web & app, and oddities when copying/pasting content into notes & it breaking the rest of the note are just some of the minor issues I personally struggle with. Features such as presentation mode and larger transfer size are fine and all, but neither of which I personally care for - I primarily take text notes and have some images embedded here and there, so I'm not necessarily asking for a major shift in features. I want to find reasons to pay for Evernote as I depend on it so much from a notebook aspect, but alas, I haven't been convinced that they necessarily care about addressing these pain points.

I almost got used to the old interface, it was pretty much the same for 7 years so I had plenty of time, the new one introduced this year I can't seem to adapt to. What were all those employees actually doing?

A blessing in disguise is that this made me find an alternative which was trusty Atlassian Bitbucket, along with their free private repos each can be accompanied with a markdown tolerant wiki, sure it's not quite the same but as a developer notepad bitbucket wiki has worked out quite well.

The latest news just locks me further into migrating all remaining bits from evernote, then again if the 47 employees let go were responsible for web client new material UI (there is no support linux client) and the remaining employees rollback and want to do as little innovation as they did between 2008-2014 then perhaps I'll reconsider

I rely heavily on Evernote. I actually thought about making my own notes system before, but the native apps and doing synch right is a hard thing to do, especially when talking about a complex system of notebooks, notes, tags, file attachments, search, etc. You don't get that with a file system.

I've tried evernote as a consumer and couldn't quite figure out where it fits between dropbox and other "cloud" providers such as gDrive and MSOffice 360.

It seems like a smart move to focus on the features that are most useful to their core users instead of trying to be everything to everybody.

You know what _really_ sucks about this? They're closing off the API & got rid of their evangelists.

Do you have a source for that? Closing the API seems crazy, since if done right it should provide far more value at far less cost to the Evernote team than many other features. Will this mean that all the 'Share to Evernote' integrations from email clients and other apps will cease to function?

Looks like the Evernote API is still open, alive, free and public:

https://twitter.com/evernote_dev/status/650089211844890624 https://twitter.com/evernotehelps/status/650086523719671808

If they kill their API, this will probably be the end of Alternote...

A bit surprised no one has mentioned SimpleNote (www.simplenote.com) - a stripped down note taking service.

i dont know what the financial situation is with simplenote or how it works but after the whole springpad thing im not in any rush to get into bed with some service that might not be around in a few years.

It's a fair point - I'm going to wait to see how Notes syncing works with iCloud on Mac/iPhone but that is most definitely not an open solution. To date I've used Google Keep and Google Docs.

I'm a long time Evernote user (I think I got an email stating I was in the first 3k users) but I'm also seriously considering migrating away to something else. My company is moving to Office365 and with that I've been exposed to OneNote and it looks like a good alternative (though the lack of a Linux client is a big problem).

The other note-capture tool that I've used religiously is "The Brain"[0], it's great for bookmarking and visualizing relationships (I even use it as my address book for contacts), it handles notes, links to files and URLs and can be synced with Dropbox or via their own cloud service.

[0] http://www.thebrain.com/

I've had a love/hate relationship with evernote since forever. The idea of storing everything in evernote really appeals to me (invoices, receipts, warranty, contracts, ...) but yet scares me too since there are wild stories of evernote just loosing stuff.

On the other hand for simple note taking evernote really sucks, it's too cluttered and it's editor is subpar.

A few years ago I was an avid springpad user before they shut down, but they suffered from the same issues: too bloated, not really good editor. But it worked beter for me than evernote.

To me it feels like evernote tries to solve 2 separate problems: taking simple and small notes, archiving and indexing important documents. Unfortunately it fails at both for me :(

I used to be a customer for a while. Then went with org-mode + git and never looked back.

Interesting. I used both Evernote and DEVONthink on OS X before. Now, I'm storing all my notes in plain text org-files on my Dropbox - but without version control. Do you share your git-repos via Dropbox or somethink like that? Or do you have a git server somewhere else?

The only thing I use Evernote for is for indexing research that I do for work. I got burned early with their tool for writing, but it was still compelling for that use case. The tagging & search is fast, their web clipper is best in class and annotation capability works great.

But there's a cost. I don't like having years of information stuck in an app that makes it very difficult to extract.

My guess is if the new corporate direction is to monetize/nickel&dime, I'll take on the lift to moving. I can get 90% of the functionality that I need in the native OS X filesystem with spotlight comments and little helper apps, and I have a work Mac now.

> I don't like having years of information stuck in an app that makes it very difficult to extract.

Why do you say it's difficult to extract? You can select one, several, or all of the notes in a notebook and export them in either HTML or XML format, with all metadata (tags, etc.) and embedded media included. That seems pretty good to me, and it's certainly easy. If you wanted something more sophisticated, Evernote on the Mac has exceptionally complete support for AppleScript, so you can code up whatever kind of fancy extraction you need.

I'm not asking to be argumentative; I've always considered Evernote's support for extracting data to be pretty darn good, and clearly superior to many competitive apps/services, so I'm curious to know what additional functionality you would require before you'd say it's not "very difficult" to extract your information.

Ah, this explains all the notifications I've been getting trying to get me to go premium. Not that it's a big deal—I can't blame them for trying to monetize—but I had noticed they'd gotten a lot more aggressive lately.

- The Windows version sucks: I have a really long note and now I cannot open it, the whole program just crashes. - The Mac version is OK. Still running fine. - The Web version looks cleaner, but it doesn't have a highlight tool??!!

Another major complain is that it's really difficult to store code in a note.

I started using [WizNote](http://www.wiznote.com/) recently and it seems really good: markdown, free, multiple directory support, comments, etc

IMHO Evernote is feature complete. It would be great if the company for a while switched focus from growth to support and just collected revenue. However who knows maybe revenue is not their goal and they just wait to be bought by Facebook.

Btw does anyone remember this article? https://www.fastcompany.com/3012870/dialed/evernotes-quest-t... Have they changed their mind yet?

It's worth noting that even after letting 47 people go, they have positions open on their careers page. New CEO trying to make his mark by dealing out a bit of worry to the underlings.

It is possible to reduce employees in one area while hiring in another (after all, your company's focus may have changed). These two events are not mutually exclusive. After all, they're not reducing their workforce by...10%, maybe more?...because they're losing money hand-over-fist.

> 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.

Hopefully we will now see some competition in this space, rather than "Evernote" being the answer to "Why aren't you launching?". Though given their finances, I suspect not...

https://transpose.com is an interesting start, but needs a big cash injection to make it better - and suffers from data lock-in again.

Anyone knows which non-core features will be affected by this?

Evernote Food was already shut down (https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2015/09/16/better-brainstorms...) a couple weeks ago.

Evernote feels like the Microsoft Office of the Notetaking world: it's huge, it's bloated, and it seems to be continuing to focus on stuff that the vast majority of its userbase will never use.

At some point I installed Google Keep, which is lightweight, easy to use, and syncs, without feeling like I just installed an entire suite simply to jot down some quick notes.

Last time I tried Google Keep is too simple for my taste. It maybe a good todo list to post-it note maker, but not for permanently notes that have reference value.

I reckon Evernote would be good bolt-on for a cloud collaboration company like Huddle or Box. The problem is that it's not worth $1bn to a company like that, so any acquisition would result in a paper loss for those who invested at a $1bn valuation (not to mention the founders and employees who would probably get screwed by liquidation preferences).

I am also worried that Evernote didn't innovate in the recent years, but I still consider it a best notetaking application on Windows. (and I tried several others like ResophNotes, Onenote, etc). I can quickly add new note by clicking on tray icon or by global shortcut, filter notes by tag, and Search is also spontaneous.

Does anyone know an online doc editor like Google Docs but one that lets you create sections within the doc and move them around?

I write a lot of articles and I have to constantly rearrange sections to achieve a better flow. It's getting annoying to constantly copy and paste chunks of text to move them around.

great question. Also similar I have been seeking an equivalent online docs product with built-in flows from draft to review to approved

The problem with Evernote is they lack vision. Or maybe focus. Not sure which one. I understand selling socks makes money but ...

I was under impression that Evernote will evolve into something like RealTime+Word+Powerpoint - but no :(

I think Evernote is done. They lost their mojo and there is no way to get it back :(

For those looking for an Evernote-to-OneNote migration utility, see my comment in this thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10301284 --- it seems to work fine.

...and then there came OneNote and syncing was even better, features even more, collaboration best, and it was free and I started using it and soon after I never accessed Evernote again. And many, formerly hot loving Evernote fans in my peer group changed, too.

I was thinking to get an account (free one), but after reading many "negative" comments I'm rethinking it. Will probably give it a try anyways... At the moment I'm only using it as a FF plugin for "cleaning up" blog posts.

So what is are you paying for at evernote that you cant get (or get well) elsewhere. I haven't used it myself for more than a few minutes and didn't see it but obviously there is something there. Curious to understand what exactly that is?

I use it for everything I want to remember, on all the different platforms I use, stored in one place and easily retrievable. Interesting articles, web pages, quotes, network settings, mails, recipes, shopping lists, to-do lists, pictures... It's available on Android, iOS, Windows, in different browsers, in different apps or software. Everything is searchable, even images thanks to OCR. And I can keep a local copy of my data.

Once you're hooked, you just keep using it, like extended memory.

Issues I had with Evernote which made me switch to Trello:

* Rubbish font handling and formatting

* Superfluous functionality when it doesn't get the important things right

* The new beta interface doesn't give you a nice general overview of your notes. I preferred the old interface.

If I could find something that did image and PDF OCR as well as Evernote, I'd probably migrate, but for now, I'll risk the data loss for the ability to search everything so easily. I certainly welcome recommendations though.

Is there a solid way to type/paste code and format it properly in Evernote finally?

Last I checked that was near impossible despite it being a largely solved problem in every other text input service out there (Slack, forums, StackExchange, etc.).

I wonder how effective their free to paid conversion is. I have never felt the need to move off the free account. I liked OneNote better but it didn't have the same reach as evernote at the time.

I use evernote for shopping lists and logging my workouts - not exactly mission-critical stuff. It is buggy and I frequently find my last amendment reverted. I cannot imagine using it professionally.

I am a premium member and I stopped using Evernote when I understood how their versioning works! Seriously, they should rename it to regular backups at 8hr intervals.

I would gladly pay for Everynote Premium if they had automatic backups. Why isn't this an option? I just want to be sure my stuff never disappears, regardless.

The real question is - will Chris O’Neill listen to what core paying users have been asking for with regard to keeping the basic application functional.

I thought it was weird that Springpad, a much better alternative to Evernote just randomly gave up.

Maybe note taking apps just have no money in them?

For people looking for replacement ideas: I use Zim + Syncthing. Works on my Linux machines, and Android app works OK.

I used Evernote for a few weeks & it lost a bunch of my work. I can't believe they are still around.

I used to be a evernote user for a long time then last year moved to OneNote, OneNote has come a long way.

I wonder if this is a prelude to some acquisition or merger to make the company more sellable.

The first two charts in the "Growth" section has significantly different scaling!

the only thing that keeps me using evernote is the ability to forward emails to it and then merge similar ones.

If something else did that I would swap in a heart beat and for my other notes I'd convert them to google docs.

Do they really have a "Go Premium" CTA at the end of this blog? Wow.

And so it begins...

I wonder if this is why I saw so many notifications from Evernote lately for me to verify my e-mail address trying to churn up some apathetic users?

And the death of the unicorns begins

Why did they have so many offices?

"The three offices that closed were in Taiwan, Singapore, and Moscow, according to a company spokeswoman. While the Moscow office was more development-focused, the other two were concentrated on sales and marketing. All of its Asian operations will be relocated to Seoul, South Korea, although it will maintain an office in China." http://uk.businessinsider.com/evernote-layoffs-2015-9?r=US&I...

Mind that "an office" can be only one or two persons doing some local marketing work or do some specific feature implementation.

Url changed from http://www.businessinsider.com/evernote-layoffs-2015-9, which points to this.

That article includes some pertinent information that's not in the blog posting, though (which offices are closing, one of the products that's being discontinued).

what's evernote again? I keep hearing about it but never seen it or have used it.

Something that came pre-installed on my last phone and couldn't be removed, and obnoxiously kept updating itself and asking for more permissions.

No idea what it does, that annoyed me too much to ever find out.

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