
Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel - gumby
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/business/evernote-what-happened.html
======
etairaz
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...](https://lifehacker.com/download-of-the-day-
evernote-2-0-windows-253471)). 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...

~~~
jwr
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.

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

~~~
slantaclaus
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

~~~
erikpukinskis
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.

------
whack
The main problem with Evernote seems to be that their total-available-market
is way too small to justify their valuation and expenses. It's core success is
as a note-taking app - how big is the market for that really? They are
competing against free alternatives like Emacs-org-mode, Apple Notes, and
Google Keep. Sure, they can carve out a niche for themselves as a premium
multi-device cloud-based no-ads app. But a $1B valuation? I don't think so.

Evernote sounds like a company that tried too hard to be something it wasn't.
_" Smart covers for your feet"_? Really?? The founders of Evernote could have
built a very successful low-expenses high-margin lifestyle business that would
have made them very rich. _" Unicorn or bust"_ isn't always a winning
strategy. I hope the other startup featured in NYTimes today - Superhuman -
learns from Evernote's failings

~~~
e40
I use Google Keep because I had sync issues with Remember The Milk on Android
and wasn't about to continue paying them, but Keep is trash. It's a typical
side project from a Googler. It's exactly what it was like when they rolled it
out. Maybe a tiny feature here or there was added (I haven't noticed any), but
it's a static service that is barely usable.

~~~
shakkhar
I use Google Keep every day. These are my requirements from my note taking
app:

\- simple plain text note-taking; \- available on android, iOS and web; \-
available offline and syncs (more or less) reliably; \- full text search.

I do not want more features on my note-taking app. I do not want it to go on
steroid. Google Keep is not trash. It is perfect for the intended audience.
You are just not part of that audience.

~~~
lazyant
Google Keep updated itself and deleted all my data, everywhere, just saying.

~~~
koverda
I find Google docs to be so clunky and slow.

~~~
_jal
My company uses Google docs.

Anything destined for for that pit of despair I write in vi and excel, and
copy/paste or import. Docs is not quite awful, but nowhere close to nice to
use.

And "just search" as an organizing principle for docs from lots of people who
aren't information nerds ends up leading to a bucket of ass. Newhires end up
doing broken things because they found an outdated doc, you have to pick
through multiple versions of other people's crap that never goes away, etc.

I keep all my docs to myself and render-to-Google when something needs to be
shared. Reminds me a bit of blogging, really, with crappier tools.

~~~
mantas
I love how Google fanboys downvoted you to oblivion.

Come on people, when is sharing an opinion worth a downvote?

------
CPLX
It used to be fantastic. The killer app for me was that it was actually
impressively good at searching text _in images_ which at the time felt like
magic. Like you could take a picture of a whiteboard or your handwritten notes
from a meeting or slide on a screen at a conference and then do a free text
search of the keywords in it a few months later and find it.

It was also really good at clipping web pages and helping you find them later.
I really really liked it for free form research, like when you spend a couple
weeks looking into a business idea to write up a detailed report later and
want to find the reference to that concept or statistic you remember.

Ten years ago that kind of thing was really hard to do reliably and they were
good at it.

But then instead of building on that success the product got worse. Oh well.

~~~
stcredzero
_But then instead of building on that success the product got worse. Oh well._

Evernote seems to have some sort of "reality distortion field" which is
somewhat like Apple's, but somewhat mis-calibrated. (Apple's own "reality
distortion field" originated with Steve Jobs, and has been losing its
calibration ever since he departed this world.) They have a tendency to start
with things which feel "magic" then have them fade into "meh." I've tried
Evernote a few times, but it just never stuck. It's in that category of, "It
seems like it could be really cool, but for some reason, it isn't."

~~~
tech_tuna
This is how I feel about Slack. I use it, it's everywhere but it's pretty
ordinary.

FFS, they still haven't implemented a dark theme yet. . . isn't that something
you can just do in CSS?

~~~
dexterous
Here's the [black theme]([https://github.com/widget-/slack-black-
theme);](https://github.com/widget-/slack-black-theme\);) and a [Solarized
Dark]([https://github.com/widget-/slack-black-
theme](https://github.com/widget-/slack-black-theme)) one for good measure.

------
dalbasal
Failure, in this context could either mean product or company failure, and the
"fail fast" adage is usually applied to product, not company. At least as this
article presents the story (executive churn, etc), it sounds like company
failure is the main part of it.

The issue with "unicorn" failures is that a product can be really successful
in objective terms (users, revenue, profit..) but still an investment failure,
_if it fails to live up to valuations._

So, if investors in 200X thought (and paid as if) the company had N
potential... N becomes definition of success. They'll also, in all likelihood
have already begun to spend accordingly to that N level. Failure of one kind
leads to others

As I said, it sounds like there are fundamental company issues with Evernote,
but it also could be that it's more of a failure to live up to expectations
(we should have been slack!) than failure in objective terms.

..I know people who like Evernote.

~~~
duxup
I often think of the story of the guy who posted here about how his startup
"failed" but in reality it just didn't bring in the massive cash flow that was
hoped for.

IIRC he bought it from the investors for cheap (so they could get it off their
books) and then just ran it as one guy (maybe a few more added part time
later)... and it does just fine in that conext, and who knows what might
happen from there.

Kinda makes me think that a lot of Unicorn style world domination or nothing,
result in some business opportunities being lost if those are the only two
options.

~~~
wool_gather
I'd like to read that; it sounds like a good story. Do you happen to have a
link?

~~~
duxup
[https://medium.com/s/story/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-
build...](https://medium.com/s/story/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-a-
billion-dollar-company-b0c31d7db0e7)

Thanks to rutierut who remembered it better than I did ;)

------
wbharding
The Evernote detractors camp has grown to epic proportions in the past year,
which is warranted, but I strongly disagree with the contingent of detractors
who claim that Evernote's downfall was having the audacity to raise their
prices, or limit the scope of their free version. So many of the customer
rants I read are focused on this aspect, and it misses the point. Good
products are entitled to charge a price for their use.

The reason Evernote is dying is because it wasn't a good product. Nobody could
fix the long-term tech debt they accumulated, which grew to become regular
bugs in the product. And rampant feature bloat.

There are a slew of able replacements to Evernote now available. The landscape
of note taking software in 2019 is a very different place than it had been
when Evernote started. For them to beat back companies like Notion (and imho
Amplenote) would have required heroics on par with what it took to build the
company in the first place. Simply getting sync right is itself profoundly
challenging for a company with their legacy [1]. It's years of infrastructure
decisions, and a consistent dedication to an unpleasant development task.
Newer competitors (incl free options like Google Docs/Keep) were ready and
waiting to do better.

[1] I've spent the last couple years trying to build an Evernote replacement.
Sync for us is very tough, but must be a pit of despair for companies liked
Evernote who built their note content out of HTML

~~~
taberiand
What confuses me about products like Evernote and other CRUD services is -
it's just a notebook app. How is it truly worthy of the army of coders, or the
millions or billions in valuation that similar CRUD acquires?

It feels like there is a tendency of projects like this to grow too far, too
fast, until they fail - dollar signs in their eyes obscuring a reasonable
vision of their scale and potential, which is far more modest than they
realise.

But then again, the ones that remain reasonable don't get in the news I
suppose.

~~~
idlewords
Evernote had a lot of odd tech bits in it, it wasn't just a CRUD app. At one
point you could take a picture of a beer bottle and it would OCR the label for
you automatically. I'm sympathetic to your argument (since that's how Pinboard
competitors have died) but Evernote was a universe of its own.

~~~
enraged_camel
And consider this: performing OCR on product labels is _nothing_ like
performing OCR on a neatly typed A4 paper that has been scanned. It is an
enormously difficult feat that probably required at least a small team to
accomplish.

~~~
nitrogen
Or a small army on mturk

------
daybreak
I used to love Evernote. The thing that killed my enthusiasm for them was the
constant upselling, even for paid accounts.

I paid for a Plus monthly subscription (a lower tier) and there were constant
advertisements within the app to upgrade to Premium. Upgrade buttons that
would reappear even when I remove them, notices on the bottom of the note UI,
etc.

I could understand the constant advertising for free accounts, but for paid
accounts it was infuriating.

~~~
mkr-hn
I see no ads/upsells on my free account. Maybe that was one of the things they
got rid of after the CEO (new?) announced the new direction.

------
hartator
The thing is - what made Evernote great at some point - take a picture of
anything and forget it doesn't work anymore.

You can't trust Evernote to have searchable archive anymore. Instead it's a
convoluted app with lot of useless features. They lost their focus.

~~~
duxup
I think a lot of the problem is the sort of hook that makes these apps great
... isn't often a sustainable thing or isn't enough to maintain user and/or
investor expectations.

There's a lot of gee whiz out there.

~~~
acdha
> isn't enough to maintain user and/or investor expectations.

I think the latter part is key: VC funding means people are pressured to chase
huge returns and over-compensating staff (especially at the executive level)
as if they’re a billion-dollar company. That frequently leads to neglecting
the “little” things which would actually make it better for users — in the
case of Evernote, I stopped using it because the sync was unreliable and the
apps desperately needed a QA/UX team with veto authority. Tossing everything
into Dropbox should not have — but almost always was — a better experience for
me and I stopped using them around 2013.

------
40acres
The first order problem is that VCs are desperate and dumb, in a low interest
rate economy everyone is looking for high yields and that desperation will
lead you to believe that a note taking app is worth a billion dollars.

The second order effect is that the valley is still way too concentrated,
there are billion dollar ideas out there that can really make a dent in the
universe, and inspiring entrepreneurs across the globe -- but with such a
myopic view, Sand Hill Road will never be able to reach out farther than
suburban Redwood City.

------
duxup
Maybe fail fast should also include ... fail cheap?

>Lots of once-hyped companies live on the “Remember this?” spectrum. On one
end, there is a cluster of fast flameouts — the Yo-Ello-Peach-Meerkat-Stolen-
Clinkle-Secret-Color coterie.

That makes me think someone should create (maybe has) a start-up graveyard for
folks to peruse.

~~~
zanny
Properly executed an explosive startup that burns fast and fails hard can
still net the founders substantial change just by setting their own salaries
and running investor money through the ringer fast and furious.

I don't really think its in the self interest of someone trying to make a
successful product in tech to take a landslide of outside capital to try to
grow a functioning, healthy business. But its definitely in the self interest
of the founders if the goal is to get big and blow up. Because getting big
alone has many benefits - besides the aforementioned pay, you become connected
and influential in the industry in ways that can absolve you of responsibility
to outside money in your future ventures or interests.

~~~
duxup
Yeah there absolutely is a perverse incentive there.

Investors throw so much money at these guys and by doing so... can create
incentives that straight leads to driving the investment into the ground and
walking away with a bag of cash / future prospects.

------
jonahhorowitz
I stopped using Evernote after they started pushing their "sharing" features
in the UI so hard that I struggled to use it to take notes. I just wanted a
notepad that synced between devices and they wanted to be something else.

~~~
criddell
Me too.

I want Evernote Personal which would be just the core product and a web
clipper. The only advanced feature I really would want included is OCR of text
in images. Every time I search for something and it finds a snapshot of a
whiteboard with that text on it, I get a little thrill.

FWIW, I am on the $35/year plan even though I only use it maybe 10 times per
year.

------
charlesdaniels
Lots of people here mentioned they are looking for Evernote replacements. Here
is my experience with this:

Joplin[1] seems to be the best in my view. It's cross-platform, has decent
sync capabilities, plus a web clipper. I've been using this for a while and
have liked it a lot so far.

I used Quiver[2] for a while when I used to run macOS, but moved away from it
because it was macOS specific. It also had some features lacking, namely no
spell check (an issue that Joplin also has, although I believe this is being
worked on). It also dosen't have a web clipper.

OneNote is ok, but I don't run Windows (I used it at work at one point). The
killer feature it has is collaboration with other uses on the same domain, a
la Google Docs. If that's not a use case you have, it's probably not
worthwhile. Also no web clipper.

I briefly tried zim[3], but found that it lacked polish, and didn't have a
mobile client or a web clipper, so I never fully moved on to it.

For a long time, I used Sphinx[4] plus several extensions and wrote everything
in rst, with syncing accomplished via git. This turned out not to be very
ergonomic to use, had no mobile client, and no web clipper.

Some other note taking apps that I've heard of but not tried personally:

* Turtl[5]

* TagSpaces[6] - tried the demo briefly, but didn't like the UI, also the iOS client was abandoned at that time

* Standard Notes[7]

* Inkdrop[8]

1 - [https://github.com/laurent22/joplin](https://github.com/laurent22/joplin)

2 - [http://happenapps.com/#quiver](http://happenapps.com/#quiver)

3 - [https://zim-wiki.org/](https://zim-wiki.org/)

4 - [http://www.sphinx-
doc.org/en/master/usage/restructuredtext/b...](http://www.sphinx-
doc.org/en/master/usage/restructuredtext/basics.html)

5 - [https://turtlapp.com/](https://turtlapp.com/)

6 - [https://www.tagspaces.org/](https://www.tagspaces.org/)

7 - [https://standardnotes.org/](https://standardnotes.org/)

8 - [https://inkdrop.app/](https://inkdrop.app/)

~~~
Stratoscope
OneNote does have a web clipper:

[https://www.onenote.com/clipper](https://www.onenote.com/clipper)

~~~
larrywright
It’s nearly useless. It embeds a screenshot of the page into a note. I don’t
think anyone who works on OneNote has used a real web clipper before.
Certainly not one as good as Evernote’s is.

~~~
awa
There's an actual "Article" mode which cleans up the text and puts text in
onenote (and not screenshot).

Disclaimer: Ex-MSFT/onenote engineer.

~~~
larrywright
Ah, you know I just noticed that a couple of weeks ago. Alas, I use it only
for work, and it still doesn’t work due to a OneDrive limit (can’t fetch my
list of notebooks).

It’s still not as useful as the Evernote clipper, but it’s not as awful as I
said it was.

------
kauffj
[http://archive.is/yqb83](http://archive.is/yqb83)

(Archive link for those who prefer non-broken web experiences)

~~~
barking
Thank you so much, the ny times seems to have my number whatever i do but this
works.

~~~
fjp
$ curl [nytimes article link] > article.html

Then open it.

I wish this worked for the WSJ too, but it appears they're smart enough not to
send the full article text in the initial request unless you're logged in

~~~
barking
Thanks never heard of curl before today (!), I think it's something i need to
install (i'm on windows)

~~~
eppsilon
IIRC curl works in PowerShell as an alias for Invoke-WebRequest

------
achillesheels
SaaS subscriptions are magical when they work; they provide much needed
regularity to cash flow forecasting which assuages investor timidity.

However, creating a subscription model doesn’t necessarily mean there is a
service that warrants it.

~~~
muro
Subscription is great for the company "selling", might be fine for other
companies paying it, but I absolutely despise it as an end-user/private
customer and will do everything I can to find an alternative (e.g. with a
single-purchase license).

~~~
yoz-y
Single purchase licenses are way better but a company with a cloud component
can not be sustainable on that model. One option is to provide a way to
offload the cloud storage to another company (such as Dropbox syncing).

~~~
cameronbrown
Depends how much data users use. I have a feeling you could store and transfer
a lot of data for a £40 fee.

A couple of alternatives:

1\. Decouple the cloud syncing component and sell that as subscription, with a
sync-less version for a fee. PWAs mean you don't even need to give up the web
platform to do this nowadays.

2\. (My personal favourite) is sell a perpetual license but charge for feature
upgrades. Retro, I know.

3\. Sell a subscription licence which includes a perpetual license for the
latest copy of the software. If you stop paying, you stop getting updates.
JetBeains works like this with their products.

------
gaze
Evernote failed because their product was sub-par. Onenote always provided
better organization, better pen input. There were just numerous places in
which you could see that man-hours were being placed in the wrong places.

~~~
ghaff
Mentioning OneNote sort of makes another point as well. I expect a lot of
Office users have never heard of OneNote. The whole general category that lets
people save notes of pieces of the Web for later use just turned out to be not
that big a thing for most people.

I should be a target for this sort of software and used something else in the
same general vein for a few years. But I don't really like everything tied up
in a proprietary format even if I can export bits and pieces to some degree.
And more generally just tend to go back to text editors, word processing docs,
etc.

Put another way, it's software that sort of demands 1.) That you want to
carefully save/curate what you read and write for later reuse and 2.) You go
all in on a particular program.

~~~
gaze
I, like many others, use OneNote for science and engineering purposes. I use
it to keep hand-written notes from seminars, calculations, discussions with
collaborators, as well as keeping track of every every wafer I've fabricated
on. I take my tablet into the cleanroom with me. When I'm repairing a piece of
equipment, I take pictures and paste them in my notebook and draw on them
where I think a failure has occurred. My daily experimental workflow involves
making a new sheet per day, logging my changes to my experimental setup, and
pasting matplotlib plots into it. My life as a scientist revolves around
onenote. If you go to a conference, you'll see numerous people with their
surface pro or surface laptop, surface pen, and a copy of onenote open.
Evernote missed the opportunity to make a real tool. They kinda almost did.
They sorta grazed by making a real tool. Enough so that I sunk more time than
I wish I had into trying to make their software work for me before throwing my
hands up and realizing they're completely unserious about what they're making.

~~~
ghaff
The tool I used for a time was fairly explicitly aimed at researchers as I
recall. Though TBF that's probably a pretty niche area. (See also Scrivener on
the Mac which targets screenwriting and book writers. It's been around for
ages so I assume it's making someone a bit of money but, I also assume, very
much in the lifestyle business level of revenue.)

~~~
egypturnash
I wanna say Scrivener exists - or at least it did in the first place - because
it was a "scratch your own itch" kind of project. New versions are pretty
rare, it's twelve years old and only on version 3. Checking their 'about us'
page ([https://www.literatureandlatte.com/about-
us](https://www.literatureandlatte.com/about-us)) confirms that; the founder
learn to program explicitly to make the

There's a total of twelve people listed on that about page, only three of whom
are programmers. Most of them are also writers, including two of the
programmers, and it sort of sounds like a lot of these jobs are part-time.

So yeah, definitely lifestyle business rather than unicorn.

------
bayareanative
Evernote stumbled and failed to execute so many times. The got hacked, had a
clunky/yucky UI forever and lost people's notes. Plus, like a meal kit service
or taxi app, they didn't have anything that was inherently defensible. That's
why they failed.

------
olivermarks
Instead of this 'long and winding road' wry style pr, the reality is EN
spectacularly screwed up. They had the world at their feet but got in their
own way. I still use it because incredibly there isn't anything better i'm
aware of (I tried onenote but didn't like it) but for me EN is a case history
of the incompetent side of valley hype

~~~
par
how did they spectacularly screw up? honestly asking.

~~~
olivermarks
Code quality of the service they were offering: It's improved a little
recently but search is still bad, the shared document function was very buggy
and made material disappear. General bugs and niggles in past.

~~~
dehrmann
> search is still bad

Search is hard. Google has the benefit of getting a lot of training data.
Corporate intranet search, searching your documents, etc. has to actually
figure out relevancy and can't infer it from having already served that query
thousands of times in the last day.

~~~
olivermarks
This is the problem Slack solved, their search is pretty good

------
submeta
In have 12k notes (stuck) in Evernote. Every now and then I look for
alternatives and come across products like Notion [0], Bear, Apple Notes,
Emacs+Org, Notability, and many more.

All of these tools have their strengths and use-cases. But none of them has
the power of Evernote (API that lets me access my notes via Python, boolean
search, ocr search, saved searches, folders and tags that I can jump to, local
copy of my notes on my Mac). But Evernote is old. I would love to use markdown
in my notes (see BearApp!), more flexible and nested folders (see Bear or
Notion). Also my gut feeling tells me that this company won’t exist in a few
years from now. So I need to move on someday.

There are a few companies that shouldn’t have pitched VCs that expect billion
dollar valuations. Evernote is one of those companies. Soundcloud is another.

[0] Notion: too slow, does not keep a local copy of my notes, search is not
comparable to Evernote‘s search capabilities)

------
slantaclaus
Apple's "Notes" application is a well known unreliable piece of shit.
Evernote's core functionality is extremely reliable and valuable to a lot of
people, including myself. Maybe Apple should buy Evernote.

~~~
matwood
> Apple's "Notes" application is a well known unreliable piece of shit.

Since the big update a couple of versions ago Apple Notes is one of the better
note apps. Syncing works great, and it has been far more reliable than any of
my forays into Evernote.

~~~
java-man
just curious, is it easy to export all the notes to a file, or migrate notes
to a different machine without using iCloud?

~~~
dangus
Not without third party software it seems.

Search for “Notes Exporter”

~~~
java-man
Thank you.

It appears to be a leitmotif with the apple ecosystem: they try to lure you in
and then keep you in by limiting your choices of interoperability.

At some point, this should have a negative overall: the number of users gained
vs. the number of users not joining due to fears of being locked in.

------
acd
It is time to tell the Pegasus from the Unicorns. Unicorn is a magical
creature horse with no wings. A Pegasus i a magical horse with wings. The
macro economic policy that feeded Unicorns was ZIRP zero interest rate policy
where magical unicorns pops up from central banks printing new money. Macro
economic it could be that trade barriers read import taxes will feed inflation
that will force central banks to raise interest rates.

Unicorn, has no wings.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn#/media/File:Domenichin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn#/media/File:DomenichinounicornPalFarnese.jpg)

Pegasus has wings [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus#/media/File:The-
Winged...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus#/media/File:The-Winged-
Horse.jpg)

Unicorns Exist Only When Money Is Free
[https://www.advisorperspectives.com/commentaries/2018/05/10/...](https://www.advisorperspectives.com/commentaries/2018/05/10/unicorns-
exist-only-when-money-is-free)

~~~
greesil
Does it bother you that this mythical animal metaphor is being extended to yet
another creature? But since we are here, I would consider Falkor the
Luckdragon to be a better choice instead of a Pegasus.

~~~
hedora
When it comes to pony based economic plans, Vermin Supreme is clearly the best
choice.

However, I will have to read up on Falkor.

------
bastawhiz
Evernote is a great case study in lack of (or very poor) product management.
They even have "The five percent problem" attributed to them. Their product
lost any semblance of focus. What they sell obviously has _some_ value, or
they'd be gone. But by making their software not particularly good at
anything, they made it really hard to love.

Evernote lost me almost ten years ago. They somehow managed to lose about half
of my data. Devices would sync and have merge conflicts, even when none of
those files had updated (leading to an explosion of notes that were just
duplicates). Search never seemed to produce relevant results. Google Keep came
out and solved at least my most immediate needs, and I never went back.

At the end, I remember having real trouble trying to find features that I knew
existed. The UI would change and I'd be lost. They had an explosion of
features (like Office pre-ribbon) and nobody knew enough to (or had authority
to) put their foot down and fix it. It's a real shame, but underscores the
need for a smart product org and talented designers.

------
jimmaswell
Tangentially, what I want in a note/todo app is that the first screen will be
a list of categories, like "car" and "shower". Under "car" would be a note I
made that says "bring new SD card for dash cam".

I'd look in "car" before heading out to the car, and see that note and
remember to bring the SD card out to it. I'd habitually check all of these
before doing anything, so I didn't keep forgetting things I needed to do like
bringing an SD card with me when I head out instead of having to walk back
into the house once I'm in the car and remember or bringing the new shampoo
bottle into the shower before I get in it. Also useful would be repeatable
checklists, for things like putting my xbox controller in my backback before
heading out on a frequent long trip.

Is there anything like this?

~~~
Terretta
OmniFocus

Or really, most any Note/ToDo that has first class support for GTD aka Getting
Things Done which leverages the notion of @contexts.

~~~
jyrkesh
I've been playing around with a similar concept for the last year or so, with
contexts like "On the go", "Have / Do not have internet connection", "Access
to work intranet", etc., and whether a phone could do a good enough job of
determining whether you're in a collection of those contexts.

Thanks for pointing me at OmniFocus, it looks really cool. Unfortunately, I'm
an Android/Windows guy, and I doubt the Web version is going to be good enough
at contexts for it to be worth it for me... :(

EDIT: Might give this one a try:
[https://appfluence.com/productivity/priority-matrix-
omnifocu...](https://appfluence.com/productivity/priority-matrix-omnifocus-
android/)

------
tomhoward
Also let’s not forget the founders of Skitch, who (in the absence of any
better options at the time), accepted an all-stock acquisition deal by
Evernote.

I mean, all’s fair in love and war, but wow that really turned out to be a bad
outcome for the developers of a product that, at its peak, made a pretty huge
impact.

------
rmbryan
Article missed the MOST important part of Evernote's collapse, IMHO:
[https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/16/13979778/evernote-
privac...](https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/16/13979778/evernote-privacy-
policy-opt-out)

That's why I left Evernote. I can't imagine trying to tell their story without
mentioning that.

~~~
dahdum
Same reason I left after years of paying, they later backtracked but I’d moved
on and don’t really trust they won’t do similar again.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _they later backtracked_

Evernote never embraced privacy. On-device encrypted and analyzed notes would
have made them a natural Apple acquisition, to boot.

------
dreamcompiler
I've been burned by half a dozen note-taking apps/services. They all lost my
data or went out of business. (Not Evernote; never tried it because of all the
stories about data loss.)

Now I have a subscription to Dropbox and everything goes there. I edit notes
with Emacs on my laptop and the builtin text editor in Dropbox on my phone.
It's not great, but Dropbox has never lost my data and I don't have time to
try yet another program that almost certainly won't sweat the details of how
sync should work.

------
FailMore
A bit of a nuts idea for Evernote: you pay a (decent $$$) monthly fee and you
get your own boss. They help you manage your life and make sure you are doing
all the things you plan to and enable you to calibrate your time management /
ability to do things when you say you will.

~~~
opencl
There's already another company offering this.

[https://bossasaservice.life/](https://bossasaservice.life/)

~~~
Normal_gaussian
When it did its show HN I asked their support team a question; they
acknowledged the question, said they would get back to me, and today I'm still
waiting.

I have left bosses that don't deliver on promises, I'm not going to hire one.

------
hirundo
I'd like to leave Evernote (I moved to Linux, which they don't support, and
their web app is insufficient). But for me the killer feature is doing OCR on
PDFs and images you post and including it in search. I haven't found that
elsewhere. Does anyone else do that?

~~~
zenbob
OneNote has this: "OneNote can search typed text, handwritten notes, and words
that appear in inserted images." [https://support.office.com/en-
us/article/Search-for-Notes-in...](https://support.office.com/en-
us/article/Search-for-Notes-in-OneNote-for-
Windows-10-01F1DA59-8B41-4DC7-B060-9A220AD2EC57)

But it won't help your Linux support issue :(

~~~
nika1975
Unfortunately search in images never works for me in OneNote. I have quite a
few PDF documents with scanned contracts as images and none of them are found
by OneNote or OneDrive search.The content in the images of the PDF files are
immediately available in search results on my Google Drive.

------
PhasmaFelis
Who is the target user for Evernote these days? I started looking for a
replacement after it perma-deleted a hundred or so active notes because I
emptied my recycle bin, and once I realized that OneNote was, for my needs,
superior in basically every way, I never went back.

------
dash2
I'm an Evernote user and have been worried recently about the direction things
were going. Features moving from free to paid and such. I take many notes on
the app and have years of jottings - I would hate to get trapped in a corner.

This new CEO sounds reassuring ([https://evernote.com/blog/looking-ahead-
evernotes-priorities...](https://evernote.com/blog/looking-ahead-evernotes-
priorities-2019/)). Like he's got his head screwed on, and wants to build a
great productivity app and a profitable, sustainable company - not be "the
Nike of your mind" (sheesh).

------
barking
I've seen a couple of the series of videos that Evernote have been releasing
recently explaing the company's plans etc to users. Ian Small comes across as
a decent, down-to-earth guy, the sort you'd like to see succeed.

------
burtonator
Evernote's failure really motivated me to work on an Open Source alternative:

[https://getpolarized.io/](https://getpolarized.io/)

It's slightly different than Evernote and more focused on reading + spaced
repetition integration.

The next version I'm working on add support for folders and better three level
notes preview.

The one thing I need to add, to enable a full Evernote alternative is the
ability to take standalone notes.

Right now they have to be attached to books / PDFs which is a bit limiting.

------
jbpadgett
I’ve been a subscription paying Evernote customer since 2011 and use the
service literally everyday. I hope they make it and the service can continue.
The features I love the most are the ability to clip websites of interest as
research and tag them the way I like for search. I also find that some
websites I clip disappear over time. So my clipped copy be ones my own
personal “way back machine” copy.

------
pyrophane
I don't use Evernote any longer for several reasons (lack of Linux support,
privacy, etc), but I haven't been able to find anything to replace it for my
use case. Evernote has a great web clipper and handles handwritten notes and
scanned PDF documents really well. That, combined with its reasonably good
search and organization features (tags, notebooks) made it really useful for
me.

~~~
alex_anglin
I've found their web clipper has really gone downhill. Best I can tell is that
it's getting conflicts with ad-blocking plugins over cookies - as in I need to
log in all the time and sometimes it maybe works at all.

In the bigger picture, it seems from a customer side that the vast majority of
what they've been focused on developing over the past few years has zero value
to me (i.e. work chat). They ought to be very concerned about their future if
that's how their product is being perceived as evolving.

------
welder
Funny that Evernote had an impact on me wanting to do a Freemium business
model back in the day, but maybe I shouldn't have valued their public advice
as much as I did. Their CEO gave a talk that I can't find right now with some
nice graphs that showed freemium working for Evernote at the time. Anyone able
to find that talk?

------
_JasonE
My wife and I tried using Evernote for keeping a running shopping list. Our
options were: You can copy the shared note, but only that most recent version.
Or, you can keep it as is but always have to navigate to the "work chat" and
click on the note there (no way to add a shared note to your notes without
copying it).

~~~
epynonymous
not trying to spam, but i created a shared action item tracking list myself,
free to use, my particular use case was to track everything in our family from
buying things to other tasks. i could also use this for work, only iphone.

[https://getsdone.xyz](https://getsdone.xyz)

regarding evernote, i use this religiously, but mainly for personal note
taking with sync across devices.

------
samcat116
One of the biggest ways I was hoping that evernote could win at was surfacing
Notes after I created them. They had some browser extension that showed
relevant notes next to your Google searches, but this didn't work that well.
This is something none of the major note taking applications have gotten right
yet.

------
vietvu
They are just not good enough. It came early, dominate the market, then so
what? Google Keep is more light weight, One Note basically provide the same
feature, and better. Even Apple note is getting more value recently. And
Evernote is not free, why using it then?

------
euler_angles
Someone gave me one of the Evernote Moleskines once. It turned out that all
the fancy features only worked on the iOS version of the Evernote app. That
was not obvious to the kind person who bought it for me.

Left a little bit of a sour taste in my mouth as far as Evernote is concerned.

------
nsxwolf
I've been using the free version forever, and I've never felt compelled to
subscribe. I can't be alone in this.

If I suddenly had the need to use it across more than 2 devices I'd have to
pay but that hasn't come up yet.

------
polskibus
I use Evernote to store mostly bookmarks, tag them, sometimes I take a note
with it. I'm mostly reliant on the search by tag feature. I use Evernote on
multiple devices that sync.

What would HN crowd recommend as an Evernote replacement?

~~~
SirensOfTitan
I've heard great things about Notion.

Nothing beats emacs/org-mode + beorg on iOS for me though. beorg even has
scheme-based scripting, although I haven't tried it out yet.

~~~
komali2
The orgmode hype I still don't get. I code full time in emacs and still don't
get it. Maybe because all the use case blog posts I've found can be reduced to
"you must discover a user flow for yourself."

I can't even tell whether I should have more than one .org file.

~~~
subsection1h
Do you take a lot of notes? If so, what do you use to take notes? Some people
don't take a lot of notes, and Org mode might not be useful to them.

My personal wiki includes several thousand .org files that are interlinked
using hierarchical tagging. No other note-taking tool I've evaluated has all
of the features and efficiency of Emacs and Org mode.

For example, Evernote doesn't allow users to enter tabular data and make
calculations on that data, which Org mode supports. The suggested solution for
Evernote is to attach a spreadsheet file. That's what I did with the various
note-taking solutions I used back in the 90s. Now all of my small sets of
tabular data are included in the same files as my notes.

------
microdrum
I feel like Journal <[https://usejournal.com/>](https://usejournal.com/>) is
sort of the platonic ideal--what Evernote should have been. Search-first.

------
jcslzr
I once heard a podcast and some guy who worked there said that the problem is
that they took investor money and they had to grow and ended up fucking up a
great small app.

They said at one point they were selling t-shirts.

------
bprasanna
Wishing them luck! I really like their app. They do have so many things to
sort out in terms of feature request/bugs. Wish their perseverance should pay
off eventually.

------
ethank
Scannable was and still is one of the best "take a picture and scan a
document" apps out there. But Evernote, which has 15 years of my life stored
in it, sucks.

------
surfsvammel
I still use Evernote. It holds PDF scans of all my receipts, articles I read,
scans of my snail-mail etc. I am not sure what I would replace it with:(

------
winslett
What are the tax implications of Evernote failing? Do the founders have to pay
taxes on the investment that has been written down to zero?

~~~
snowmaker
No. That's not the way investments work.

~~~
komali2
Oh. How do investments work?

------
craigds
I never had a use for Evernote, but I was always bitter towards them after
they bought and gutted Skitch. Skitch was amazing

------
writepub
Regardless of traction, is a note taking app (with nothing defensible tech
wise) worthy of unicorn valuation?

------
linuxftw
I remember when someone first showed me evernote with a bunch of hype. And I
was like "This is pointless, I can't believe it's a company."

I think we can refer to that as the age of 'cloud madness' where anything and
everything cloud-related was the new hotness. I think we've forgotten just how
strong the buzz-wordiness was around cloud, it was prolific.

~~~
barking
I get you but if you go on to the discussion forums for evernote either on
their site or reddit you'll find people who have their entire lives at their
fingertips thanks to this app and for whom it's vital to their work. They use
its IFTTT functionality to an insane degree such that every document they get
it's one click on the phone and it's filed.

~~~
linuxftw
I'm sure there's a subsection of hard-core users that find it really great.
The people I interacted with it were just treating it as a document cloud. For
me, I carry my work laptop everywhere when I'm working.... so I don't really
need to do much on the phone.

------
yumraj
That is all fine, but there fundamental question still remains as to why
_anyone_ would think, or thought, that a _note taking app_ would be worth
billions in valuation.

~~~
andybak
Yeah. I remember thinking the same thing about microblogging and photo
sharing. :-(

~~~
jimktrains2
And chat, e.g. whatsapp and alack

------
oluomike1
Love Evernote. A key feature is still missing.. find a way to reach out. I
have a side project I've been working on for years.. maybe they can start
believing again

------
MasterScrat
What alternatives would you recommend?

~~~
stillworks
Depending on what the use case is, (for me it's note taking, bit of
math/equations, code snippets)

\- Joplin Editor is nice (due to KaTeX), "cloud" syncing can be made to work,
iCloud not supported though

\- Quiver [https://happenapps.com/](https://happenapps.com/) , is paid, but
math/equations are supported via MathJax, iCloud is supported

Currently, Joplin works for me but Quiver is overall better.

------
joelrunyon
Notion.so

------
ChicagoDave
I used it for a bit, but OneNote is the 800lb gorilla that really is a great
app.

------
cntlzw
paywall

~~~
flerchin
Delete NYT cookie, refresh page. In Chrome and Firefox this is available in
just a few clicks by clicking the area immediately to the left of the URL.

~~~
s_trumpet
Firefox's "Containers On The Go" addon lets you spin up disposable tab
containers (see "Multi-Account Containers") with a single click. This works
wonders for sites with limited free reads; it's increasingly the only way
Medium is browsable for me.

------
JohnJamesRambo
Basing a business on a notepad app seems unwise...

~~~
duxup
It did fill a serious need though. Other people followed including Microsoft
making their own product as well.

~~~
levythe
Microsoft OneNote was released in 2003, while Evernote was founded in 2007.
There were changes Microsoft made to allow OneNote to better compete with
Evernote, but they did not make the product itself in response to Evernote.

~~~
barking
I moved from evernote to onenote earlier this year. It was easy to move all my
stuff (i was never a heavy user) using the tool onenote provides for the
purpose. I have no complaints. I moved because I felt guilty/insecure being a
free user of evernote. Onenote doesn't give you the guilt trip and it's got
that Microsoft permanence about it.

