
Evernote is in deep trouble - coloneltcb
http://www.businessinsider.com/evernote-is-in-deep-trouble-2015-10
======
gaze
Surprise. Evernote is just such a shockingly low quality product. First of
all, as a note taking company, you CAN NOT LOSE DATA. EVER. I use my notebook
for keeping data and derivations and lecture notes. Data is the most valuable
thing in my profession, insights sometimes don't come twice, and lectures are
often never given twice. So, the service already sucks. The client is buggy
and bloated with features... Which I find somehow insulting since they're
developing new useless features and selling merchandise that nobody needs
while they're ignoring crucial flaws in their software.

Finally, and maybe this is something only scientists people care about, their
pen input support is abysmal... AFTER acquiring one of the best note taking
products for the iPad! How have they managed to screw this up so bad? OneNote
gets all these things dead on correct, and that's why it's the standard in
labs that keep digital notes. Evernote does not seem to understand the role
their product takes in people's lives. I really hope they either shape up or
go away so they can stop distracting people from what they actually want.

------
stevoski
From this article, I have some of my software business beliefs validated:

\- don't be afraid to charge money

\- release frequent, small updates. Users tolerate this much better than
infrequent big updates with major changes

\- focus on quality. Every update should include several bug fixes. As much as
possible, fix bugs before adding new features

\- focus. Put all your eggs in one basket, to some extent.

\- watch costs like a hawk. Operating in 10 locations sounds like Evernote let
their costs get out of control.

~~~
curiousjorge
I feel like this should be engraved in stone and delivered to anyone who is
thinking of getting into this game but try telling that to a hot headed under
30 founder who is worried about burning that cash as fast as possible to 'grow
big and sell the company'.

I almost feel like SV is all about exits and not enough focus on meaningful
products that arise out of genuine passion to solve a real problem.

~~~
api
Those kinds of founders need a dose of reality. That path is usually more like
"burn lots of investor cash and your reputation, then fail." For the very few
who sort of pull the pump and dump burn to exit thing off there are dozens who
just crash.

~~~
curiousjorge
doesn't seem to happen. people who raise ridiculous amount of money seems to
do it again and again and investors are happy to keep shoveling piles of money
around. vast amount of money is moved around and evaporated.

that kind of money if distributed to single founders who have a working
product, generating revenues would have a far more benefit to society and
consumers instead of one giant company that bullies it's way into the markets
by splashing money around.

~~~
api
I've seen that too and I still don't understand it.

------
staunch
Evernote is only a weird bloated SaaS company (with hundreds of employees)
because they followed the wrong business model.

Evernote should be more like Minecraft (Mojang). A cool piece of software that
a handful of people develop but a billion people use. They would be wildly
profitable and worth many billions to Microsoft and others.

~~~
lalos
True. Like Sunrise ([http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2015/02/11/microsoft-
acquire...](http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2015/02/11/microsoft-acquires-
sunrise-creator-innovative-calendar-app-mobile-devices/)) and Acompli
([http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2014/12/01/microsoft-
acquire...](http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2014/12/01/microsoft-acquires-
acompli-provider-innovative-mobile-email-apps/))

------
fredfoobar42
The Evernote Mac client is the one of the worst piece of software on the Mac
platform. I've actually been using a $5 replacement app, Alternate, and moving
my Evernote text notes back to nvALT synced through Dropbox.

Evernote, please, I do not want:

\- Work Chat

\- Headlines from Business Insider

\- To be CONSTANTLY BUGGED TO UPGRADE

That's the biggest thing. I'd love to give Evernote money, if I knew I was
going to get left alone. Instead, all the Evernote Premium members I know are
_still_ bugged to upgrade and get all these stupid, useless features thrown at
them that they don't want.

~~~
mark_l_watson
I agree with you. I am a middle tier ($25/year) user and I eschue the Mac app
and just use the web interface.

I filed a bug report last week on getting too many nags to use new features.
On my Android phone, saying NO to using a new feature did not prevent many new
nags about the same feature.

It is this nagging that might convince me to not renew my yearly service when
it expires.

------
paulsutter
Evernote has me hooked on cross device persistent notes. And I will change to
the first quality alternative that lets me import my existing notes from
Evernote.

Evernote still can't handle even simple non-overlapping changes on two
devices. Every time I close my laptop I have to wonder if changes were
synched. Especially embarrassing because superb open source code is already
available for conflict resolution (git, for example).

EDIT: someone should write a notekeeping app built on github.

~~~
corobo
The thing I've become hooked on and am desperately trying to find a
replacement for (just in case) is the functionality that adds a checkbox to a
text file which can then be searched for with the todo: search parameter. For
example "notebook:Pdcast todo:unfinished" will show me notes with things I
still need to do (any unchecked todo checkbox will mean the note appears in
that search)

I realise there's a billion and one todo apps out there, but being able to
combine my ramblings and 3am thoughts with an in-line todo system is the
killer feature for me. I think the next notes app that supports this will have
to be a self-hosted option

~~~
wtbob
I'm pretty sure that you could do that with org-mode…

~~~
corobo
Interesting and thanks for the heads up but I don't believe I'm quite
compatible with that software. I guess I'm also looking for usable-at-3am
features, web accessible, phone accessible (currently iOS), centralized or at
least synchronised, and the only feature Evernote doesn't seem to provide -
backup-able files/database

CLI, Linux.. emacs (!). I'm not sure I could manage to grasp emacs during the
middle of a really good day much less a quick note at night

~~~
TY
How much would you be willing to pay for this software? Available on all
desktop and mobile platforms, with flawless synchronization and ridiculously
good search capabilities?

~~~
corobo
How much are you asking? Evernote's pricing plans and features work for me,
I'm looking for a viable alternative in case it vanishes.

Picking up some sarcasm in your comment, could you ask the questions or make
the statements you're hinting at and I'll be happy to discuss!

~~~
TY
Thank you for your reply.

No sarcasm in my statement at all. For the past several years, I've been
looking for a personal knowledge management application that would work for me
and now I'm seriously thinking about just writing it because I can't find one.

I'll probably write one even if I can't make a business out of it, because I
need it. I'm also curious about the business potential and have been asking
people in my personal network.

Evernote's pricing seems like a good benchmark - I heard that from several
people already.

------
archildress
Evernote is such a great idea and in its early stage, it showed a lot of
promise as the "trapper keeper" of all things digital. But as time went on,
the client became bloated and there were weird products like Evernote Food
that were pushed on users.

I'm still using it for certain parts of my work, and I'm increasingly
frustrated with the pop ups in the application every few days to upgrade to
Evernote Premium.

Someone is going to make a product that looks a lot like Evernote that's going
to succeed. But I think Evernote's best days are behind it.

~~~
yabatopia
Don't forget Evernote Market, where you can buy - for unknown reasons - light
purple business socks from Evernote. Talk about losing focus if you have too
much VC money.

------
r721
Big recent discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10299642](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10299642)
(448 comments)

------
shughes
Did anyone else notice the recent Evernote update in Mac's App Store have a
lot of suspicious positive reviews? Most of them were by accounts that had
only submitted that one review.

When you compare it to the reviews of their past updates and the fact the
current update just fixes minor bugs, their image improvement campaign seems a
little over the top.

~~~
Dystopian
Wasn't really suspicious - there was a call-to-action at the top of the app to
help Evernote by leaving a review (the reviews help their app store
optimization).

There are a lot of die hard Evernote advocates out there that'd be happy to.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Holy hell. Today I learned that "appstore optimization" is a real thing...

~~~
jakeva
It's not just a real thing… it's big business. Entire companies exist around
it.

------
xname2
All I need is a good web clipper like evernote's Clearly, so that I can
directly save cleaned webpage to a .doc file in a Dropbox folder. Still can't
find one.

Also, why dropbox does not create a simple note taking app, just save notes to
a dropbox folder?

~~~
on_
If you don't need it to be a .doc, Google chrome allows you to save webpages
to PDFs just by going to file > print[0] and it works quite well. The Evernote
clipper worked pretty well IIRC, but either way you will have to edit the
markup a bit to get the results on a very cluttered page. In a pinch though,
chrome does a great job if you don't want to have evernote simply to clip
pages.

[0][http://www.labnol.org/software/save-web-page-as-
pdf/21153/](http://www.labnol.org/software/save-web-page-as-pdf/21153/)

~~~
PhantomGremlin
I generally avoid Chrome, but I'll give that a try. I hope it works better
than my experiences with both Safari and Firefox on OS X.

Those browsers have long supported what is mentioned in your linked article:

    
    
       File -> Print -> PDF -> Save as PDF
    

However, it's very hit-and-miss of what results you'll get. About 80% of pages
come out fine, but the remainder can be quite awful. And it's unpredictable
which browser will do better on any given page. At the least, you'd expect
results to match printing to paper, but sometimes even that doesn't happen.
Safari has a Reader View that produces good results, but I don't think very
many websites support it.

Unfortunately, certain websites go out of they way to prevent us from saving
them to PDF.

------
captn3m0
Don't know if these recent articles will turn out to be the death toll for
Evernote. Kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy. At this point, Evernote
could pretty much do anything and still nobody on this thread would be
convinced they are doing it right.

Another thing that I never liked about evernote is their API is perhaps the
worst API I have ever encountered. Thrift should never be used for external
APIs, period. [0]

[0]: [https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-poorly-written-
APIs/answ...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-poorly-written-
APIs/answer/Abhay-Rana?shared=1)

------
jseliger
It's interesting to me that EN is apparently in deep trouble partially because
of buggy feature releases. Three days ago I wrote this comment in response to
the last article about EN:

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...](http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html)
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...](http://jakeseliger.com/2010/11/12/scrivener-or-devonthink-pro-with-a-
side-of-james-joyces-ulysses-2/) , though I understand that some people use
Evernote differently than DTP.

Mostly it seems to me that DTP is very close to "feature complete," for lack
of a better term.

~~~
veidr
How does the sync between machines work, in your experience?

I know it wouldn't work for a lot of people, but I myself keep looking at
switching from Evernote to "DevonThink Pro Office" because I would be OK with
going Mac-only to get reliability.

(I know Devon has an iOS app, but my understanding from their own forums is
that the iOS app is basically garbage, and the users are all basically waiting
for Devon's rewrite that has been in progress for years; is that right?)

I do need it to reliably sync 500,000 items across multiple computers though,
even if they are all Mac. Last time I checked, that didn't really work, the
sync was a hack built on top of Dropbox and it had tons of problems. Do you
use that and has it improved?

~~~
jseliger
_How does the sync between machines work, in your experience?_

Not that well. For me it's not a huge issue: I use an iMac as my primary
machine and keep that as the primary database / state. If I end up doing a lot
of work on a MacBook, I manually copy from it to the iMac.

 _I do need it to reliably sync 500,000 items across multiple computers
though_

Probably it's not for you! I think you can get a free trial, though, and test
it.

------
pyrrhotech
A great example of why the "number of users" metric is being overvalued. Until
there is a solid, proven and scalable business plan to translate usage to
revenue the $100 per user standard valuation shouldn't apply.

~~~
scosman
Maybe for late stage investors, but if you applied that strategy as an early
stage consumer investor you would have missed almost much every big hit (FB,
Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, etc).

~~~
nine_k
Twitter is a dubious hit. It's wildly popular, but its profits are very
unimpressive, to say the least.

~~~
scosman
$20B market cap. You could argue it should be $10B, but 'dubious hit' for an
early stage investor is ridiculous.

------
lips
It's striking to me that here on HN, where there's rarely anything approaching
consensus on software user satisfaction (IMHO), evernote is being roundly
blasted. These feelings weren't formed in 2015 (I've been disappointed by it
for years), and yet they continued to let it fester. (Shruggy guy)

------
minikites
If you need note syncing, use Simplenote. Evernote is almost certainly
overkill for what most people want.

------
edwinnathaniel
I heard this a lot: Evernote sync-ing is buggy. Could someone point to me how
to implement a good cross-device sync-ing algorithms? Or is it perhaps just as
simple as using object version based on timestamp?

I've never done this before so I have no clue how easy/hard it is to implement
one.

~~~
twic
The gold standard right now is operational transformation:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation)

But this requires that you capture every edit, which (I think) makes it more
complicated than classical merging techniques which just work on whole
documents as input.

------
erebus_rex
I was a longtime user of evernote but recently gave up. The webclipping tool
was phenomenal but the notetaking interface was so and so (their desktop app
was also poorly built which made things worse). After awhile, onenote took
care of my notetaking needs and pocket of my linksaving needs.

I think this was a great part of why evernote faltered. They just became a
repo/dump of user crap. People didn't care to engage with the platform and
therefore did not care to find out what extra value it could give them, thus
preventing them from converting to paid users.

~~~
tdylan
Were you able to import your Evernote notes?

------
visarga
I tried to use EverNote to study scanned books in TIFF format. It was painful,
it wasn't able to import 50,000 pages and apply OCR. I eventually wrote script
using Tesseract and a web app similar to Google Books. I could take notes on
the sides of the pages and the collect them by tags.

Now I use Skim for Mac to take notes form PDF files.

------
pbreit
Actual headline: "The inside story of how $1 billion Evernote went from
Silicon Valley darling to deep trouble"

Current: "Evernote is in deep trouble" (overly strong, imo).

Also, I don't think the article supports very well the "deep trouble"
description. It sounds like the company has plenty of money and continues to
grow.

~~~
ScottWhigham
That doesn't seem like that big of a difference to me. In fact, I'd say the
actual headline is more hyperbolic. _The inside story of how $1 billion_ is
specifically written to cause people to click the link.

~~~
pbreit
I Guess that's true. "Deep trouble" to me suggests the company is running out
of money and in somewhat dire straits. Which I don't believe to be the case at
all.

------
barendt
What alternatives are people using for Evernote that support more than just
text?

The main draw Evernote has for me is the ability to attach an arbitrary number
of files to a note, add some additional text or a useful title, and then
search on those notes across iOS and OS X devices. I've been increasingly
frustrated by how buggy and complicated Evernote has gotten so I'd be happy to
try alternatives that might be out there.

~~~
douche
I use OneNote, it seems to be pretty decent. Mostly I use it for bookmarking
web pages and writing quick notes across devices. I'm not in the Apple club,
but I have heard that it has decent clients for OSX, and the web interface in
Office365 is not bad.

------
drinchev
Products like this come and go. I don't know what the value of Evernote is.
I've never been a power user. I prefer using Kippt ( sadly, also shut down ) +
OS X Notes + Chrome's bookmarks + Google docs + Dropbox.

Doesn't feel like a company doing something so specialised can expect a real
growth out of a product that isn't remarkably well done.

~~~
notvladputin
While it sounds like your solution works for you, don't you think there's room
in the market for one app that does all that?

One of the ways of providing value is to do nothing particularly unique, but
to combine several things into a unique workflow.

The fact that you use 4 different services plus one that's been shutdown
suggests to me someone else might want that functionality without the trial
and error of figuring it all out and setting it all up...

------
tdumitrescu
From the article: "last year, TechCrunch pegged the company's revenue at
around $36 million, and while revenue has increased, we've heard the numbers
are still short of internal expectations"

So Evernote is valued at more than 27x revenue??

~~~
tdylan
Not a big multiple for a supposed growing company. Phil Libin said it takes on
average of 40ish months to convert a free to paid user, that's harsh.

------
nakodari
I lost my entire Evernote notebook once. After that, I've been exporting notes
manually once every month. Dropbox focused on making their "sync" and app rock
solid, Evernote didn't. It's that simple.

------
arikrak
I switched to evernote when I switched to a Mac, but I never liked it much and
it crashes frequently. Due to the 'switching hassle', I never got around to
switching back to Onenote when it came out on Mac.

------
ergest
Wrong motives (trying to be a cool company) plus wrong incentives (billion
dollar evaluation and lots of cash to burn) leads to wrong focus and feelings
of invincibility.

------
crudbug
They missed the ship without dead simple bookmark service a.k.a Pocket !

------
curiousjorge
what's evernote again? I installed it once in 2012 out of curiosity, never
used it or seen it again. Some type of note taking app?

~~~
scosman
[http://lmgtfy.com/?q=evernote](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=evernote)

