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Comment by etairaz | Hacker News Reader

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 Evernote 3, abandoned their original client base, and started charging a monthly fee in place of the perpetual license (that people already paid...). All this, to say this wouldn't be the first time evernote disappoints loyal customers. I guess you do what you have to do to survive...

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Evernote was a great application, and paying for features was not a problem (at least not for the reasonable ones among us). The problem was the the application kept growing and getting slower, more bloated and ugly. In my case, it got replaced by lower-friction apps which were better designed.

Natural selection at work, I'd say.

I think it's a problem of management not knowing what to do with developers once you have a solid stable product.

Without proper direction people just keep adding features that are only used by a tiny subset of the userbase, and you end up with a bloated application that's slow to use because it's full of functionality that nobody uses.

And of course, you still need to pay those developers, so you shift the burden onto your userbase through ads or fees, making your application less appealing.

WinZip was a good example of this.

My problem with it was that I typed things and Evernote would just delete them on sync.

Making it effectively... Nevernote?

Or Evernot.

It’s so weird I use Evernote precisely because it does not and has not ever lost any note I’ve ever written across dozens of devices over over 7 years

It’s not that weird. Whatever the error rate, there will be a distribution of people who never encounter errors and some who get them often.

I took all my grad school notes and audio recordings in Evernote. I even paid for additional storage. Then they decided to abandon loyal customers and charge subscription for just syncing additional devices. I've since moved to the notes app. One less subscription for me.

Same. Notes isn’t quite the same product — can’t easily clip webpages, create annotations, tags, etc, but largely I don’t have as much a need for that anymore!

I’m just worried about exporting my data before they go out of business, but to put into what? Is there any good, ideally open source, alternative that can accept Evernote as is?

I know a lot of people use One Note, might be worth considering. My use-case is not that heavy right now, so just it is just notes for me at the moment.

I was spooked away from OneNote. I mistakenly deleted an entire notebook on their iOS app with a single swipe and press. Bizarrely, the notebook was completely irrecoverable. Not only that, but the desktop version of OneNote, which previously had the same notebook, automatically synced the deletion. I laughed at how efficiently I was being screwed. This was a couple years ago. I reluctantly switched back to Evernote.

I’ve also had trouble with OneDrive. I like most Microsoft software, but MS needs to rework its schema for auto-save products. They’re seamless 99% of the time, but come with the black swan risk of catastrophic failure at the worst time. I’d rather just ctrl+s and email backup copies to myself.

Have you tried this - https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf ?

Just in case: here is the story and photo of whole EverNote 2 development team: https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-...

I did note renderer and editor (HTML, WYSIWYG) for EverNote 2. Later that code became Sciter Engine (https://sciter.com)

In fact I am developing Sciter Notes to bring back that handy feel of EverNote.

For now it stores notes only locally but in next version it will be possible to use clouds (DropBox, GoogleDrive, etc.) for sharing and accessing notes from Mobiles and browser. https://notes.sciter.com/2019/06/28/note-sharing-is-coming/ (or to use dedicated server for that (paid option)).

Yet: I am looking for co-founder of the project : https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/project/11572/scitern... - please contact me if someone is interested.

Firms that are 5 guys beavering away and making $10 million a year just don't get press.

And, if you take VC money, you don't even get that option.

Did the original license for Evernote 2 stop working?

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

I guess it depends on if the perpetual license was for Evernote or Evernote 2.

Around 2010, I was chatting with a colleague about them. Even then, he was talking about how its "current incarnation." It sounded like back in the day, it was a bunch of Russian handwriting recognition experts, and they built a company around that.

Turns out the "buy once forever" isn't a sustainable business model.

And business' look for a sustainable business model, because it's literally a question of life and death for them.

Looking at how people are pissed at subscription apps, "pay forever" doesn't seem sustainable either.

If people ain't paying for newer release (as in old good charge-for-major-upgrades model), maybe that piece software can be considered "done" and it's time to go after another sector?

Yeah part of me wishes there was a better payoff model for this done, but supported software. I scorn subscriptions often because it often warps into products I don't want so they can justify the payment or force a SaaS that is just waiting to pop and break it.

I first used it when it was on Palm's WebOS on the Palm Pre. They very quickly supported a lot of devices, many operating systems that are gone now (WebOS, Windows Mobile, etc.)

My experience is similar to yours. I used the desktop version in college. I was a big fan. I do not pay for the current version.

I can't read the article due to paywall, but why does a note-taking app need to be a unicorn in the first place? It just seems so excessive.

Like couldn't 80% of the value of Evernote be written as a simple, intuitive piece of software that a middle-aged programmer in Boise could maintain in his free time?

While that may be a slight exaggeration, Wikipedia's numbers of 251-500 employees sounds quite massive. I'm not obviously privy to all things the company does but it makes one wonder.

The programmers who maintain MediaWiki, the programmers who write the backend and frontend of Wikipedia, and the people who run the organization that raises money to fund Wikipedia, are all seperate organizations. Giving users the tools to view and edit Wikipedia in every language and on a variety of mobile devices is actually a lot of work.

The Evernote page in Wikipedia says that Evernote has 251-500 employees.

Thanks, I had the same confusion as the GP.

Microsoft picked up much of the functionality in OneNote. Even if the cut and paste between other MSFT apps is awful, once you have Office it’s kind of hard to justify paying for something else. Seems like an old pattern resurfacing.

oh wow i didn't know it started in 2004. i personally used it in high school to take notes at high school on my EEEPC back when those things were still all the rage, that was probably between 2007-2009 or so. i don't recall running it as a native application however, but hey my memory is spotty at best so i wouldn't trust it

They have to pay for that big building somehow.

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