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Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like Bending Spoons is where old tech products go to die? I guess that's private equity for you.

Understandably people don't like Bending Spoons - they fired the whole dev team on Evernote, and the price has gone way up too.. but as a user I have to say Evernote the product has gotten better and better since the acquisition. They've improved performance and have great new features every month.

The fact that Evernote even still exists suggest Bending Spoons has done something right

Wow, that's interesting.

I was a very early Evernote (paid) user. But they lost their way sometime after they became a unicorn, so I bailed out.

I had assumed, since they were bought, that it was just a way to squeeze money from existing users. I had no idea they were actually improving things.

I stopped using Evernote actively after they reduced a formatting bug for their exported notes from Important to Wishlist and then sold to Bending Spoons.

Bending Spoons not only fixed that particular bug, but added a lot of useful features from other tools like "Block based editing" from Notion.

They are actively improving the product in every way, and they record short monthly recap videos to talk about the improvements. They didn't milk and kill the product. It's an interesting watch.

For me, the ship has sailed unfortunately. I divided that Evernote corpus into two, and personal parts went to Notion and technical part carried to Obsidian, and converted to a digital garden.

I have no hard feelings for them, though. I wish them the best of luck.

I like Evernote but it just isn’t worth $130 / year for me. Last year they had a sale for $50 (or was it $60) for a year and I paid for that. If I can’t renew at that I’ll have to figure out how to migrate to Obsidian.

Migrating to Obsidian looks to be very easy now: https://help.obsidian.md/import/evernote

When I converted many years ago it required 3rd party tools and was slightly more involved (but still totally worth it).

Two things I suspect I'll miss from Evernote is their web clipper and their OCR.

Last time I tried the Obsidian web clipper, it was pretty rough. It would drop images or include ads. I found the Evernote clipper to be pretty much flawless.

Evernote's OCR capabilities are also great. Somehow it's able to do a better job of recognizing my handwriting than even I can do sometimes. Last I checked, Obsidian isn't very good at this which is strange because the two big platforms — Windows and MacOS — both have excellent OCR APIs they could use for free.

Wait a sec — you're saying you'll take the time and trouble to "... figure out how to migrate to Obsidian" rather than pay the $70-$80 renewal premium over what you paid last year? Let's do a thought experiment. Suppose you spend a total of 3 hours from start to finish doing the migration. That's the equivalent of being paid $25/hour in lieu of paying the Evernote full price renewal as opposed to what you paid on sale last year. I have a feeling you would not consider that close to being what your time is worth nor to what you're paid in your day job.

I'm trying to imagine a product manager calling me to say, "Hi, we just bought this product you use, we're raising prices and firing the dev team. But hahahaha, you can't quit us, I have a spreadsheet here that says your time escaping our clutches will cost you more than paying the extortion fee to cover us buying the tool and the profit we need. Tough luck, but you have no logical alternative."

I'm not sure that my relationship with tools is so bloodless that it is only driven by dollars, cents, and minutes. I'm not sure I have to clench my teeth and write that product manager a cheque.

Aside from the fact that such calculations aren't necessarily applicable anyway, it is incorrect because they would most likely have continued to use and have to pay for Evernote for more than just the one year.

You might be surprised to know that I also mow my lawn, I clean home, I cook sometimes, I do laundry, I drive myself to work, and I sometimes even watch TV, spend time on HN, or play video games.

Maybe, but you don't have to move that far down the salary scale for $25/hour post-tax to start looking fairly attractive. In the US, median weekly personal income is in the $1200 range, so assuming 40 hour work weeks, $30/hour, or a bit under $26/hour after federal income tax if you live in a state with 0% income tax.

I get the attraction of all these various online apps where you're supposed to be able to store everything in one place. But they're single points of failure. In spite of the downsides, I just use text notes and take pics of, e.g., conference slides, on my phone. But, honestly, I don't really refer back to the vast majority of that stuff anyway.

Have you ever tried Obsidian? I feel like it's capable of replacing the entire family of note and knowledge management apps.

I actively use Obsidian and Notion.

Obsidian is very good for technical and static knowledge bases. I use their publish feature for my digital garden. Having local markdown files and working on them is great. Obsidian is basically a secret sauce over markdown file format.

On the other hand, dynamic content lives much better in Notion. Databases, formulae, interconnection between other services etc. makes it a great project management tool for my life. However, due to the file format and everything can be interconnected forms both a walled garden and moat at the same time.

Both serve different niches and work very differently. So neither one is a silver bullet by themselves for all scenarios.

But Obsidian is a great knowledge management tool if used right, that's true.

They've kept the product alive but I don't know that it's terribly improved... I've been a paid user since 2008. Switching would be painful for me given how familiar I am with it but I came close this last year when it stopped letting me stay logged in on multiple Mac computers at the same time...

I was with Evernote since 07, and found it a doddle to ditch. Export the lot, bring into Apple Notes or Bear. Or a combination of the two. Sorted.

Sounds like you've already moved on from it, but if people are looking for a pretty seamless Evernote replacement, Joplin (open source) is pretty much an exact replica of Evernote and can import Evernote data.

The annoyance I have when considering a move away from Evernote is that none of the recommended alternatives have IFTTT support.

(Although having said that, I do drop most of my notes into iOS/macOS Drafts these days which also doesn't have IFTTT support. But I could probably lash something up with webhooks and SQLite if absolutely necessary.)

Is there an option to export in Evernote?

Apple Notes crashes when I try to open it after importing my Evernote notes.

> they fired the whole dev team on Evernote, and the price has gone way up too.. but as a user I have to say Evernote the product has gotten better and better since the acquisition

I'd say it's only just slightly improved now, with a few bugs fixed and features improved. Not at all worth the price increase.

And it was horrible for a good 6 months after the acquisition... Some days I could not login to the website for several hours. Images in some notes wouldn't load some days. Searches would be missing results. Bug reports sat idle for a couple months before someone would respond asking for more info.

Yes they have finally fixed some performance issues and that is a huge win

My guess is that's indicative of the price Bending Spoons paid - they get a positive return on investment if they collect existing subscription revenue, and do a bit of work which keeps the existing userbase happy.

Under the previous ownership, the gap between Evernote's valuation (ie what investors had put in) and revenue (what investors would getting back) was so great that just surviving wasn't a strategy; the business could only value the existing userbase and product as a starting point for building a much larger userbase. That's a path to enshittification.

> Understandably people don't like Bending Spoons

I have no reason to believe they are nice guys, but I also don't have the opposite. But it's interesting to me by default you think they are in the wrong.

Supposedly the people that hired all those employees didn't know what they were doing and mismanaged the company all the way to needing to sell. Why are the bad guys the ones that actually are willing to do the hard work of making the product profitable so that it can keep existing?

The fault should be with the previous owners that drove it to the ground leaving no more options, not bending spoons, imo. If it was well managed it wouldn't need to be sold.

- VC funny money creating illusion of jobs for a bit = I sleep

- Turning it into a real money engine that can sustain the product for years = real shit

> by default you think they are in the wrong.

They are an acquisition company fueled almost solely by VC loans. They want big returns, you don't get those from normal business, but you do from squeezing the life out of something.

From what i remember they did the same at wetransfer. Doubling pricings without notification.

I’ve heard the same evaluation of SoftBank, IBM, and Micro Focus/OpenText/Rocket Software. There’s some truth in that, but you can still get Visual Cobol even after a number of ownership changes. https://www.rocketsoftware.com/en-us/products/cobol/visual-c...

Yahoo tried that business model and it didn’t go too well for them. Maybe we’ll see Bending Spoons but Tumblr and Flickr next.

Smugmug already bought Flickr a few years ago and that seems to be going well.

Tumblr was bought by Yahoo then sold for comparative peanuts to Automattic, of Wordpress fame

I may recall wrongly, but IMO Yahoo used to buy hyped companies for a ton of money and let them die, it was the opposite strategy.

I think the reality is most of these are already dead, and a PE firm taking over is giving them one more chance

But BP is not a PE firm, they do have developers. Most (all?) of their acquisitions are still being updated albeit presumably on a skeleton crew.

They are definitely a PE firm. They buy up struggling companies with the aim to revitalise them, or otherwise recoup the cost of investment+ profit. They have switched to mainly relying on traditional debt rather than outside investor money recently but that doesn't make them not PE.

In fact this is much like the older form of PE, where efficiency gains were the main objective.

Bigger PE firms now usually focus on roll-up strategies (buy loads of similar companies and merge, say car washes is big right now for example, as well as dental, vet and family doctor/GP practices) as well as utilising bucket loads of leverage to amplify gains. This does not however make what bending spoons is doing not PE.

"They buy up struggling companies with the aim to revitalise them, or otherwise recoup the cost of investment+ profit."

1) Nope, they are focused on taking advantage of customer lock-in to raise prices, while reducing operating expenses to increase cash flows. There may be some initial reinvestment to increase surplus of its users, before raising prices substantially. 2) "recoup the cost of investment+ profit"? Yeah lets see if that pans out. The acquisition price is assumed to be under a going-concern basis in perpetuity, if they muck things up with the choices they make the acquisitions have a limited life to increase and capture those cash flows to deliver a positive NPV investment. The demand for the firms products are not perfectly inelastic w.r.t to price.

But PE firms don't have their own workforce, Bending Spoon does, which is why their model differs from, say, Apollo.

The fact they use some of the same tools doesn't mean they are doing the same thing. The majority of Blending Spoon's employees are devs, not finance people.

They bought Komoot recently.

They're the CA/Broadcom of as-a-service.

They are digital private equity essentially

That seems to be the opposite of what the article suggests, they seem to hold on long-term and invest in technology improvements.

seems to be less invest, and more buy mature products and find the minimum amount of money and people needed to maintain it, whilst squeezing existing customers (which generally doesn't lead to long-term stategy).

Evernote isn't being "maintained". It's being actively developed with new, useful features and being transformed to a much bigger and powerful tool month by month.

Features felt like stuck on it haphazardly are now completely integrated into the tool itself, and everything incl. performance is getting better.

I'm no longer actively using Evernote, but I have some shared notebooks there and still use it from time to time.

In this sense I mean maintain as a business not necessarily as software. E.g pivoting from growth to efficiency in the business sense.

If you increase your price as substantially as they did, you must improve the software to keep users from just up and quitting. It's not clear they have been successful in this yet, losing market share to other competitors.

That is they aren't actively trying to compete and take in new users, but stem the flow and increase revenue from their existing customer base who find exporting their data hard.

We've seen this before with lotus notes and other software and we will see it again.

Evernote was bleeding way before they have been bought by Bending Spoons. They were trying to find their way around the market, and Notion hit them like a train.

Considering the features they have added and polished, I can't say they're not trying to add new users. With their pricing strategy, they moved up tiers. They were looking like bargain bin software, but with the new price, they are not. They pulled a Chivas Regal with that move.

They are one of the companies which use AI in a saner way, and inherit a powerful foundation, and they didn't kill any integrations or export options.

The .enex format is still the best export format for these kinds of tools, from my experience.

If you look at their changelogs, you can see that this is not a "let's optimize and extort" operation. They have recreated the tool, and listen user feedback intently.

As I said, I'm not an active Evernote user anymore, so I have no skin in their game. I just want a tool I depended this long to survive in a good shape.

> find the minimum amount of money and people needed to maintain it

> you must improve the software to keep users from just up and quitting

You’re shifting the goalposts. Either they’re doing the bare minimum to maintain it, or they’re improving it with new features. And that too improving it with enough new features to justify a higher price.

And honestly, neither of these are bad things because none of their products have strong lock ins. Either they’re maintaining a service that was otherwise failing and therefore keeping existing users satisfied, or they’re growing and improving it.

Software is hard, so whether they’re successful or not remains to be seen. And turnaround stories almost never happen in software so they’re taking on an even harder job, but so far there’s little evidence that they’re been user hostile.

The hard part with any of these turn arounds is convincing users that a product they once used and loved, which they left after it betrayed them or they watched it die, is worth going back to. The “cool factor” is gone, nostalgia plays are weak, and people don’t like being burned twice by the same product.

That's true. For me, if I didn't move out of the Evernote that much, I'd be still continuing to use it.

For me, it's not nostalgia or being afraid of being burned again. It's just I have no real reason to migrate back at this point.

Have you tried to use meetup recently? It's been turned into garbage.

I found it to be garbage, seven years ago. I stopped using them, when my meetups kept getting stuffed with fake accounts, and Meetup would then pressure me to upgrade to the next tier.

I could never prove that the fake accounts were them, but the optics weren’t good.

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