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Comment by DidntUseIt | Hacker News Reader

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It's LucidSpark for non-masochists. It's Parabol for power-users. It's possibly the greatest 'roll your own' tool for workshopping and blue-sky planning to hit mass-appeal without feature and subscription bloat.

Incredible reponsiveness, UI/UX, and embeddable rich media functionality. Was like Hypercard mixed with whiteboarding and an incredibly traversable canvas.

I personally loved Miro, probably one of the best design tools I've ever used.

My old company used it across the board for basically, everything. Engineering flow diagrams, UI prototyping, team retrospectives.

I personally often used it for creating diagrams that I would later insert into slide decks.

It was basically a swiss-army knife type tool which could be applied in so many situations.

Deeply saddened that it's going to Bendingspoons, where companies go to die.

My best experience was a large meeting I had recently, in a well equipped conference room with actual whiteboards and stacks of post-it notes and the Power Miro User in the room insisted we all bring laptops and work on the boards online. Jesus Christ.

That’s not Power User, that’s Lazy User: just like how Agile tries to offload the work of managing ticket statuses onto developers, their demand offloaded the work of recording post-it note outcomes onto attendees.

Funny thing, this person is also our SAFe scrum master. So double the laziness in one package.

I often saw the same pattern in engineers who hated Agile and Jira, but then would spend weeks coding automation to avoid one-time drudgery that would have taken a tenth of the time to complete. So I am being careful not to judge “Lazy”, because that’s a normal tendency for any lifeform with energetic constraints, as itself inherently wrong — but it absolutely can be optimized to personal excess at group cost, as I would judge this refusal to use in-person paper tools to be.

That's the advantage of being in office I guess

It was a great whiteboarding tool for teams. Planning, research, meetings, standups etc. IMO they tried to cater to too many use cases at once, missed the AI train, and focused too hard on enterprise, which hurt the product a lot.

Miro is a great tool - it's not a $20B company, but it's a great utility.

Yeah, me. I've used it every day for years. With a hybrid/remote team it is a fantastic alternative to a physical whiteboard. Whole team uses it.

I don't care for or use any of the AI features.

I hope the price doesn't go up dramatically.

The price will go up dramatically, that is part of how Bending Spoons works.

Yes, I just cancelled my Evernote subscription of 12 years because of the outrageous price increase

I was an EM at Evernote through the first six months after the close (notifications team).

Left in May 2023, before they shut the US/Chile offices. The sequence was pretty consistent: cut every vendor they could (Zoom disappeared overnight), get to profitable on costs, then raise prices on lock-in.

Personal went from ~$70/year to $130 pretty fast.

The product is still alive; the company that built it is not. They were effective. It was also obvious early that most of us were not part of the long-term plan.

I wrote it up here:

https://alexkras.com/my-last-six-months-at-evernote-after-be...

Do you know anything about whether their post-Evernote acquisitions have played out similarly?

For remote companies, it is quite useful and really a white board replacement. We use(d) it for customer research, retros, design exploration, architecture diagrams, data modelling and a ton more. Figma (Jam) is way too designer focused.

> Wasn’t a whiteboard replacement.

> Wasn’t a PM tool.

I know a lot of people who used it for one or both of these. Also for architecture/system design (ie. not UI - although I guess some used it for user journey or wireframing).

There are a whole lot of people out there who use Miro for all of their documentation, planning, troubleshooting, etc, in multiple roles. It's a primary tool for many people, like a word processor/sheets/slides on steroids. And the moat they have makes it nearly impossible to take your data elsewhere. It is very entrenched.

Never underestimate what other people find useful that you do not.

i'm forever chasing the dragon of cocktail napkin + physical stickies + Balsamiq, and have never even used Miro, and even i let out a "ohhhh no" in a welp, should i just go back to bed tone seeing this

i'm just waiting to wake up to news of Luca Ferrari buying Inter Milan like some old world Mark Walter

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