
Evernote is moving all its data, machine learning to Google Cloud - Grazester
https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/13/evernote/
======
matt_wulfeck
> As a result, Evernote will be shutting down its previous storage
> architecture that was based around a private cloud infrastructure, along
> with some of its own tech.

Good riddance! Deploying Openstack Swift was a nightmare in my personal
experience. A few outages and I decided I'll never work a job supporting it
again.

If a recruiter mentions "Openstack" to me what I hear is a shamble mess of a
services with components you'll be on-call for which will break in unique
ways. Oh and of course you're expected to maintain the entire infrastructure
while you do your normal job.

Just move to the cloud already.

~~~
karma_vaccum123
Agreed. OpenStack is a total dumpster fire, yet still companies like RedHat
push it.

I _narrowly_ avoided a long term (career-derailing) OpenStack
assignment...four days in...oh, this is all based on OpenStack?... _transfer
approved_

~~~
rconti
Good to know. For a year or two now, I've felt guilty that I haven't taken the
time to learn OpenStack, and felt I was missing out on a career-enriching
experience.

------
pmyjavec
What exactly does a company like Evernote have to do with machine learning ?
Do they have a targeted advertising platform? I can see how it might be good
for things like image recognition but what else are they doing with it?

I am Genuinely curious, I've not used Evernote for several years, it just got
out of hand and bloated I found.

Machine learning is really starting to feel just like another trigger phrase.

~~~
Infernal
Their paid features include OCR, both for handwriting and images of printed
text. Seems like a textbook machine learning problem.

[https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2015/01/23/search-
handwriting...](https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2015/01/23/search-handwriting-
evernote/)

~~~
bdavisx
And I've been very, very impressed with the handwriting recognition. I
discovered it by accident before it was a paid feature when I was searching
for something and it brought up an image of some scribbled notes I had taken
with the search highlighted. And my handwriting is bad, really bad.

~~~
danso
Awhile ago someone asked how a product like ABBYY Finereader, which does great
when OCRing typed text, does on handwriting. Not well at all I'm afraid:

[https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/50dcb5a8f4230e7a8a40bfe2d0...](https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/50dcb5a8f4230e7a8a40bfe2d0a1c836)

~~~
praseodym
Evernote doesn't just OCR handwriting to a single text; it indexes a bunch of
possibilities for every handwritten word. This way the search functionality
can search through all these variations, not just the most likely one.

~~~
Omnipresent
I haven't used its handwriting OCR feature so genuinely curious. Does it not
show a single piece of text? If not, what value does the OCR handwriting
provide? Is it solely for the search feature?

~~~
julianz
Yep it seems to be, it indexes every possibility that the handwriting might be
so that if you search for it then it comes up. You can see this if you dig
through the XML it exports.

------
laocoon
I used to use Evernote all the time, although I wouldn't consider myself a
power user. I don't think I utilized all of the features very well. I came to
it through Tim Ferriss, I believe, and it was really amazing for me at the
time.

I hardly ever use it anymore, using mostly notebooks for actual note taking
now. I used to use the web clipper to save articles, but I found that when I
would put something in Evernote, I hardly ever went back to access it later.
It was like putting things in a vault. That probably all speaks more to me
than the product. I am curious what new features they can provide with access
to all of Google's machine learning APIs.

~~~
Larrikin
I'm in the same boat, I would try to save articles into it, especially recipes
but there are two reasons why I stopped.

The awful search with the web clipper plugin. It seems to match any single
word in a saved article. It just ends up being faster to ignore the evernote
typically unrelated results and look through Google results.

Inability to embed YouTube videos. Once again with recipes I'm better off
using a browser since I'll have to open one up to view the video anyway. Most
of the good cooking sites include a video embedded with the recipe, making for
a more pleasant experience in the browser.

~~~
2AF3
Instapaper is a pretty nice evernote alternative

~~~
julianz
Maybe before it was acquired by Pinterest, but who knows now?

------
gavinpc
"Its" data?

There's no mention in TFA of the data belonging in any way to the _users_. And
maybe that's accurate.

Yes, we have web/cloud apps now. But that is—or should be—orthogonal to where
data is stored and hosted. Of course app vendors have every incentive to
create lock-in. And most users are just happy to hear that "you do not need to
take any action" and your data will just be magically faster and more secure.
But at least around here, wouldn't people rather own their storage? Does
remoteStorage have any legs?[0]

This kind of happened with authentication, right? It's common now to use OAuth
to provide login using a third party. Of course, they're mostly silos, too,
but at least in principle an app could let you choose a provider.

[0] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-dejong-
remotestorage-07](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-dejong-remotestorage-07)

~~~
api
I wish people cared.

After many years in this industry I've personally come to the conclusion that
nobody _actually_ cares about security, privacy, or data ownership. People say
they do but they are lying, as evidenced by the fact that they do not change
their behavior. People gripe about security and privacy but continue to use
"free" surveillanceware/spyware and continue to migrate everything to cloud
hosts they don't control.

The only thing people care about in reality is convenience and user
experience, and they're obviously willing to give up an almost unlimited
amount of personal privacy and control to get those things.

~~~
sxg
It sounds like that might be a reaction to the lack of obvious repercussions
of giving up privacy and security. What tangible harm does the average person
come to by giving up privacy, security, and data ownership?

~~~
karma_vaccum123
You don't necessarily sacrifice those when choosing a third party. We all
apparently work in related industries...do you and your colleagues sit around
and dream up ways to exploit customers? I don't, nor do those I work with.

~~~
drdaeman
I don't think anyone does. Its rarely a thought-out malice. It's more of
unexpected things that happen because no one thought or cared to safeguard
against that, or because such safeguards would've broken some legit feature or
business model.

Like that E2E vs spam filtering issue explaination from GMail engineers.

------
cddotdotslash
There is a very strong chance that this PR was "strongly encouraged" by Google
in exchange for huge credits on the actual service. They've been hunting for
larger customers they can use to advertise like they did with Spotify.

~~~
vgt
While I've heard this narrative discussed before, I'd like to offer some
thoughts:

\- Companies do not (or should not) make cloud purchasing decisions be based
entirely on some kind of preferential pricing. Cloud is far from a commodity,
especially in ML/Big Data space. In both Evernote and Spotify cases, they
highlight strategic technological advantages of Google Cloud. In fact,
customers tend to be fairly specific in outlining their findings[0], cost
rarely being the main factor.

\- I urge you to share evidence that Spotify received "huge credits" in
exchange for PR.

\- It's not unusual for companies to make such announcements. It's very much
standard practice for AWS customers. It's good PR for both parties, imho.

\- There are many other "big" names disclosed in 2016. And it's no secret that
what Snapchat has achieved on Google's PaaS is nothing short of extraordinary.

[0] [https://medium.com/@thetinot/i-think-google-cloud-is-the-
bes...](https://medium.com/@thetinot/i-think-google-cloud-is-the-best-best-
tech-best-pricing-best-support-best-roadmap-and-best-4b4e17856505)

(disc: Work on Google Cloud and put together [0] )

~~~
cddotdotslash
Well, I didn't say that Spotify made the move in exchange for credits.
However, since you brought it up:

> Some critics, surprised by such a high-profile company going with what is
> seen as the distant Number 3 in the hyper-scale public cloud market, have
> suggested that Google extended a sweetheart deal as part of the move.
> Details of the agreement haven't been disclosed, but Nicholas Harteau,
> Spotify's vice president of engineering and infrastructure, told The Wall
> Street Journal that the company "negotiated hard on price."[1]

> Of course, for such a high profile customer and for the priviledge of a case
> study, we can assume Spotify has some heavy discounts. [2]

Not "proof," but it's pretty well-mentioned across the industry that Google
benefited from this deal probably more than Spotify did.

[1]
[http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/4500276342/S...](http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/4500276342/Spotify-
moves-to-Google-cloud-with-eyes-on-big-data)

[2] [https://medium.com/@davidmytton/how-much-is-spotify-
paying-g...](https://medium.com/@davidmytton/how-much-is-spotify-paying-
google-cloud-ebb3bf180f15#.ets0p214i)

~~~
vgt
I understand your points - it's narrative that's floating on the internet, and
it's one that's very easy to believe.

Unfortunately [2] is 100% opinion.

As far as [1], every single "large" deal is negotiated. That is standard
practice for deals of this size, including your employer and AWS. It's also
very different from "Google is the one benefitted" and "Spotify chose Google
because of sweetheart pricing" and "Spotify got paid to do PR for Google". As
I've said before, these narratives diminish both parties. It's Trump's "many
people say that..."

------
ja27
Step 1: Replace the CEO with a Googler.

Step 2: Migrate to Google platform.

Step 3: Exit via Google acquisition.

~~~
bsharitt
Step 4: Existing application shut down by Google.

~~~
throwawaymsft
Step 5: Blog post about the wonderful journey users are about to embark on.

~~~
the_man_man
Step 6: Mention a 2 week shutdown notice and do not provide support to to
download data in a sensible way or migrate to a different service.

~~~
msh
Evernote actually got nice export tools build into their desktop client.

~~~
Orthanc
Nice until you have to actually use them.

~~~
msh
I have used them to get out of Evernote. Seemed to work pretty well.

------
perseusprime11
Not sure how long they will be around but I am not sure if this is a high
yield project at this time. Instead they should be focusing on fixing defects
and bringing important features to users.

~~~
gumby
Perhaps upgrading their back end is part of doing those things?

------
kstrauser
I've migrated completely to DEVONthink (Mac/iOS only, though). Sync databases
are encrypted and they live on my own WebDAV server, so I can keep as many
notes as I can squeeze into a dozen TB or so of available storage.

I don't begrudge Evernote their business model, but I'm much more comfortable
with upfront software licensing than subscriptions. That's especially true
when it means I no longer have to trust anyone else's terms of service when it
comes to keeping my private stuff private.

------
jbverschoor
Export all to enex. Import into Notes.app. Done.

------
fulafel
Has Evernote gotten over their reliability problems? At one point there seemed
to be an exodus over eating people's data.

Eg
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7009995](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7009995)

------
copperx
I hope that they finally remove their 100,000 note limit with their new
infrastructure.

------
esseti
Is there any technical post about what to move where? Would like to know the
technology and how they exploit GC to support such a service.

------
ComodoHacker
All your data are belong to Google. Eventually.

------
mstaoru
I thought they had a good business in China? Apparently it will stop working
here once they move to G-you-know-what.

~~~
akhaku
The China service is a completely separate service from the main one.
Different servers entirely (same-ish code though), housed within servers
inside the great firewall. AFAIK that stuff is staying in the data center in
China.

(Evernote employee here)

------
overcast
It's the new buzzword of the year, now that VR is flopping.

~~~
sabertoothed
You're so wrong on so many levels.

~~~
overcast
Elaborate then please, level by level.

~~~
sabertoothed
Level 1: 'Buzzword' has the connotation that it sounds impressive to outsiders
but is not much else than hot air. Sometimes there is even a connotation that
it is an imprecise, non-technical term.

Level 2: Machine Learning, however, has been well-defined in the past
(starting in the 50s), is now widely used, contains a whole set of (old but
also) new innovative techniques and actually contributes massive value to many
domains.

Level 3: VR is far from dead.

EDIT: a word EDIT_2: I would have agreed if you had said 'trend'. Yes, it is a
trend.

~~~
overcast
Thank you.

~~~
sabertoothed
You're welcome. Thanks for being polite.

------
mike_ivanov
In case if anybody is looking for a replacement -
[https://turtlapp.com/](https://turtlapp.com/). Bonus: it's written in Common
Lisp ([https://github.com/turtl/api](https://github.com/turtl/api))

------
Balgair
A rose by any other name smells just like Google Wave's Zombie?

------
binaryanomaly
Not really that good news from a customer point of view.

And there goes my data, my privacy, ...

That said I really liked evernote. Decent alternatives, cross-platform, mobile
app, good usability, ...?

~~~
gumby
> And there goes my data, my privacy, ...

I'm not sure why this would be the case. They're just using google cloud
services (computing, storage, and apparently tensor flow). You use tons of
other services right now which are built on the same back end. It would be no
different for you and me (end users I mean) if they had chosen Amazon.

~~~
binaryanomaly
That is per se correct.

I'm careful what services I use, sometimes I prefer local p2p such as
bittorrent sync over uncontrollable clouds for personal data.

I'm mostly concerned about what they will use the deep-learning thing for
though. Not sure I'll want it to work with my notes.

