Evernote's fall from grace is complete, with sale to Italian app maker Note-taking app Evernote, once a darling of busy tech aficionados, announced the end of its 14-year run as an independent company today with its sale to Italian mobile app company Bending Spoons. It's an ignoble end for once-great Evernote, which as recently as 2018 – its tenth anniversary – boasted some 225 million registered …
And it's open source with a very active community. You can run local-only or sync to any number of devices via most cloud services.
I do miss many of the UI features that I had gotten used to in Evernote. Since Joplin is Electron based it seems heavier and doesn't have as many features. Still you can't beat the price (0) and the support.
Very interesting - thanks for bringing that term to our attention. A combination of this and "biting the hand that feeds you" is probably behind a good number of failures.
Of course, when "biting the hand that feeds you" is what your users love and have come to expect... and then you stop doing that very thing, might also be a reason why other things (well, one in particular - not mentioning any names) feel like they are slowly failing and fading away.
I suspect that the red line of unacceptability wouldn't be as sharp if users were operating in isolation, though.
The thing that link doesn't address which I think *does* apply in many cases- something likely to significantly exacerbate the "thermocline"-style sudden cutoff- is our old friend the network effect. Many people will stick with a service and be less likely to move because it's what everyone else is using.
The more people move away and voice their dissatisfaction, the more that alternative services not only become more visible, but also more *viable* due to their increased userbase. And the more that problems with the original service become prominent.
The network effect counteracts this... but only up to a point. Once you cross that point- and it isn't necessarily going to be obvious beforehand- it'll exceed the ability of the network effect to counteract and dampen it, and you'll get a runaway chain reaction of more and more people leaving because more and more people are leaving.
In other words, things will happen *fast*.
Of course, you can help force that point by doing something that forces dissatisfaction and brings it and discussion of alternatives to the surface. (Perhaps we can think of a recent example where this was the case, hmm...?)
And, of course, once the network effect is no longer working *for* you, it works *against* you. Strongly.
... see also 'tipping point' and 'cascade effect'.
Little more of the second than the first, as the cascade part actually matches the effect of crossing to the "other side" of graph from where the dampening effects are keeping the system stable. Once you hit the other side the system goes from looking stable and linear to unstable and hyperbolic(in the quadrant and direction you don't want to find in graphs of your financials)
This is a management brain killer, because they just can't seem to grasp the idea of that cliff before they are on the other side of it. The just think that doing .25x of a thing people hate worked and upped profits by 10%, so doing 5x will be fine right?
These mechanics are barely complex enough to count as complex systems, but have killed how many companies, nations, jobs, and even people? You may have finally stumbled across a good candidate for the "Great Filter"
> And, of course, once the network effect is no longer working *for* you, it works *against* you. Strongly.
Bingo. Exponentials work both ways. When things go bad in a social network, they go bad hard and fast. The user base is also the user value. Once users start leaving, the value of the network for other users goes down. So they leave. So the value goes further down. So more users leave. And soon you're left with a wind-blasted wasteland.
That's the thing, isn't it? After the obligatory three or four versions, MS finally knocked together a good enough copy and made it available for free which is enough to paper over the rest of the deficiencies.
So it went with IE, so they did with OneNote, and so they're doing with Teams.
You're either bought out by Apple, Microsoft, or Google or you just get trodden underfoot. Perhaps Evernote's management were lucky.
And so did I . I'm not fond of Onenote (Microsoft) and the Store version is just shitty.
But it means that I can access or create a note on which ever device I'm using, phone,PC,Laptop,tablet/cloud
Compared to Evernote's (then) ease of use it's poor and it's often very annoying in other ways too. But it does what I need.
I've been using Simplenote recently and I've found it very useful, although I don't have much to compare to (I have my phone with me everywhere and don't take a lot of notes, so I was just using Google Keep before). It doesn't have much in terms of features, but it does what it says and it does it very well
It was a great application for just jotting stuff down in. It was lovely to use. But it became far too interested in trying to extract more money from me, constant emails demanding money, the tightening of the screws of how many devices could use it.
In the end I just migrated it to Simple Note and haven't looked back.
1 Make an application
2 Improve it steadily and garner a loyal user base
3 Wait a few years with nobody complaining
4 Start to mess with the app. Nothing too bad at first
5 Decide to “improve” the app by completely reworking it
6 New “improved” app is now a dog’s dinner
7 Throw in some privacy-invading features for no discernible legitimate reason
8 Completely hack-off your users who leave en-mass
9 Sell app at a knock-down price to some big corporation “to move the product forward”
10 After a couple of years, kill the app and write it off as a tax loss
Sounds like Microsoft Office for Android that came pre-installed on my phone.
Used if fine for several years, saving files locally, without the need for a Microsoft Account, with no mobile network / Wifi.
Now I'm constantly prompted to create a Microsoft Account to even access the existing files I created and as read only. I don't want to use it with a Microsoft Account because I don't always have a mobile signal with my phone when I'm out and about, plus this software came pre-installed and features that were in the original preinstalled product have now been removed.
The UK is still absolutely shite for Mobile even 5 miles from the centre of most towns, if the terrain is hilly.
Microsoft employees, you live in a bubble that doesn't match any reality I know.
Why aren't regulators bringing Microsoft to task for this, forcing Microsoft accounts, forcing lock out unless users provide a phone number, on the pretence of some fake security issue, something as basic as clearing cookies. Not fit for purpose, none of them.
I know I'm supposed to be technically literate but I can't get my tiny mind around what the advantages are of collaborative editing. It appears to my limited intellect as nothing more than a dogs dinner producing dogs dinners. There's no overall point if document ownership or responsibility for a polished final product.
I've seen the results of collaborative editing and they've been dire, with a mishmash of writing style, fonts, paragraph styles, justification, bulleting, numbering - the works.
I couldn't let stuff like that go to customers and in the end the tool that became the one of choice was serial input to a document with teach changes enabled and the release via one defined person.
It's probably something like how collaborative editing should work but that's not how it happens out of the box.
Confluence - or pretty much an Wiki-style environment - is good for collaborating on a Page or set of Pages that are going to mostly be read online, but trying to get a proper "document" out of it is (was?) a pain in the backside. A document with the correct Corporate coversheet, dictionary of terminology, contents, appendices, index etc, that you can send off as a PDF to the auditor.
I've got a pile of programs and scripts that can (well, could - 99% chance the format has changed again) collate Pages and add the missing bits to spit out a usable PDF. But only from a Confluence dump - trying to get it to work "live" within Confluence wasn't working (then I left the job - if there was still a free self-hosted tier I'd be tempted to keep this code going, but the Cloud kills).
I work in the software as a medical device industry, and in a previous role, PDFing up a tree of Confluence pages formed a major part of our technical file. There were some more old school documents, but the content the important thing. You can add boilerplate to documents if you need to, as well.
Evernote is meant to be a cloud notebook, so that you could work on it from a mobile device to load notes and pictures and drawings, and then later could access from a tablet or desktop/laptop. One person I know took pictures of expense receipts with phone as they were collected, dropped them into a note, and then the receipts were all ready to load into the expense platform when convenient at desktop/office.
Evernote picked a really bad time to try to charge for the platform, as Microsoft OneNote and Google Keep were knocked together pretty quickly and worked just fine, for the low low price of free.
You can share notebooks from those, but its not usually the primary use case that you'd think of when you use it. My kids use it share their Christmas lists with the rest of the family.
As a technical writer, I find that collaborative editing is somewhat useful for getting SMEs to contribute their real thoughts.
To wit: Many software engineers that I have worked with grudgingly provide the bare minimum when asked for technical content; but when they open a collaborative edit and see that someone is wrong, they respond in much more detail. This produces an actual conversation of sorts -- mostly driven by endorphin hits from showing others just how smart they are, but whatever.
Obviously I have to edit the doc extensively to make it usable, but at least I have the necessary content to work with.
I used to be a techwriter, I can so deeply relate. Sometimes you have to nail the engineer to the floor and force them to give you real feedback. They start with "I read it, it's fine", but you start probing them on the accuracy of one sentence and by the end they have given you enough corrections to re-write half the content.
Having jumped to writing software instead of documenting it, I've reached the conclusion that the engineers (at least where I work) don't have a culture of feedback anywhere as strong as what I've seen in what I'd call "commerical" liberal arts fields. Writing, visual art, music, theater...when I've studied these things, providing and receiving feedback was constantly hammered into us. From what I've seen, some software development cultures could really benefit from learning this ethos.
In every setting where I've used collaborative editing, it's just a matter of getting multiple people to contribute to one document. There's always a final owner who handles the last layer of polish before it goes out, but having collaborative tools (especially in school, where our quality standards were a bit lower) does make it a lot easier to get a report together. Formatting is obviously an issue, but it's the kind of issue that can be fixed reasonably quickly relative to the research/analysis that goes into the body of the paper.
(And again in a school environment: it helps a lot to be able to see whether you're working with the kind of classmate who pastes shit in from Wikipedia. Learned that lesson pretty quick.)
Collaborative document:
Markdown (or force a minimal subset of (La)TeX) with the file maintained in the VCS of your choice (I still like svn 'cos TortoiseSVN is simple enough for the non-techies: update and commit, simple words).
Build machine (or cron or a never-ending Windows dot-bat) gets latest copy, tops and tails with cover sheet, contents, headers & footers, bibliography etc then formats it into PDF and HTML on the shared drive (whether that is LAN fileserver, DropBox or whatever) and website.
For big docs, one input text file per chapter/section.
For people editing on their phones & tablets, the tricky bit is the VCS - can probably bodge that with the Build job and per-person shared folders. Merge conflicts still painful.
I was quite happy to pay for it back in the day. I really didn't mind paying for a service I used every day. It took notes. It formatted things well. It could preserve (or not!) formatting from other sources. It did checklists and other basic but useful things. It could encrypt sensitive data in-place. It had a neat interface for taking pictures and resizing them to be useful. It had passable OCR. It was very reasonably priced.
And then the UI change. Good lord. I have a "Personal" notebook or three and I have a "Customer" notebook for each of my customers. Is there any way for me to see that on the landing page of the mobile app? Is there shite. It's going to show me my 2 (two!!!!) most recent notes used, give me another for "Suggested" (apparently a pure random number generator). To get to my notes as organised I have to click some breadcrumbs, "go to my notes", "Filter Notes..", "Located in..".
Now you can (almost) fix this. Of course you can. You can customise the landing page with any combination of widgets you like. You can reorder them and so on... If you pay. The ability to access your notes in less than ten actions on a mobile is a fucking premium feature. Currently something like six of your local currency _every single month_.
The whole app and user experience is just a giant pile of fuck you, and all you get for paying is slightly less fuck you.
FWIW, the Covid app by Bending Spoons was surprisingly well done. It had a straightforward GUI, it didn't drain my battery, it didn't pester me with pointless notifications, it was open source and it didn't shift any of my personal data outside the phone. I think it even did a decent job of tracking who was near me, from looking at the files it accumulated, although I can't be sure because (see above) it took privacy seriously. It still failed, of course, but that was for... other reasons; from a technical standpoint, it was quite a bit better than I expected.
I usually have my phone with me so keeping notes on it is obvious. I also have an iPod in the car for music and another for audiobooks. If I could back up my notes via BT or WF between the devices, I'd be all set. I'm far too down to Earth to have my head in the Clouds.
I still like written notes. When I had a "real job", I'd keep my todo list on paper and update each day before I clocked out. I found pleasure in being able to pick up a pencil and line something out or to be able to add to an item some hints, doodles or whatever. No wimpy underlining for me, if I was going to underline something, it was going to be thick and bold. That pencil thing is very versatile and the battery never goes flat.
I used it for a while. I didn't stop because of the restrictions of basic (I was not attaching photos and docs other than once, just actually placing notes in it, and only had 1 mobile device so I was not restricted by the quite low sync limit.) I just found I quit using it after a while; I didn't need the notes I'd left in it any longer, and for my usual use case of wanting to type* in a quick note for later I can send a text to myself (Message+) or send to myself in Telegram. This is of course not very organized, but my random set of notes in Evernote wasn't either.
*Every android phone I've had has had a keyboard as well as a few pre-Android models like LG VX9800...currently a Blackberry KeyOne, so I am actually typing notes and not tapping them in on an on screen keyboard.
I have recently swapped to Obsidian, it uses markdown language for notes and stores them locally so you don't need a Internet connect to access. But I sync mine through one drive to be available on all my devices. Also the files are all stored in pure text so can still be accessed if obsidian disappears in the future. Awesome product.
As usual people who find Evernote pretty brilliant, like me, won't have time to post here. On the desktop it's brilliant anyway - the iOS version not so much and buggy, but I mostly use that just to refer to existing notes.
The big disruption at v10 was to move to a single-source that behaved the same way across platforms. Every platform was different and incompatible. It couldn't go on. They bit the bullet, and playing with bullets means collateral damage.
They just need to keep moving forward, fixing bugs, adding features, accepting that you can't please all of the people all of the time.
Why does everyone expect everything for free? You know there's no such thing as a free lunch - right? When Google, Microsoft or any others say "Free", they really mean cross-subsidised from another income stream, abusing their market dominance to drive everyone else out of the market. Anti-Trust legislation says that's illegal, but everyone turns a blind eye to it because there would be uproar.
I have used the free version for 8 - 10 years. It does what I want. It takes notes, lets me copy and paste useful info I need for whatever small project I am working on, copy and paste from almost any source, searches through my notes, syncs with my tablet. When doing small jobs where the invoice is too small to bother sending and will be combined with the next one, I can add time taken per day until it is worth invoicing. It's not perfect, but it works for me as a one-man band. So I don't need the extras in the paid version, I don't need it on a dozen devices, just two (I'd prefer three, but I can live with two), I don't need ten people to access my notes, just me. I don't need huge data requirements each month. I can see how a small business might run into the data limit and need the paid version of course. And if the paid version is getting trickier to use, they might decide to switch apps.
Yes, I've looked at alternatives but there's the learning curve and transfer of data from one system to another. And the possibility that something I do need is not available in an alternative. Because some alternatives are just too simple. I had planned to write my own web-based note-taker many years ago, as it is such a simple thing to do for a single user. And I have even seen simpler versions than I had planned becoming a business and getting sold for nice sums of money. But as Evernote works offline as well as online, I decided to drop my own online-only plans as I sometimes stay at a location with very poor wifi and phone connectivity.
I have no plans at the present moment to close my free account, because it works. It's a shame that they overexpanded their nice paid app and lost customers. I hope the new owners don't scrap the things I like - free being the main one, and advert free of course - and that any updates are well-received by users. However I suspect that the new owners will eventually integrate it into one of their own apps and stop taking new Evernote paid subscriptions after that. Just paid versions of their own systems. Followed by no more free versions. I still recommend Evernote to friends who might move on to the paid version.
And as I use LibreOffice, I'd need to switch back to MS Office to get an unlimited OneNote. Not sure I want to do that - I had a paid MS Office and the company I was working with forgot to update my licence, so I switched to LibreOffice to get work done while waiting, and stayed with it.
Came here to say the same thing - I've been a paying customer for a long time (maybe a decade?). Find it works perfectly for what I need. I use OneNote and Outline for other use cases but for saving recipes from web pages or taking a pic of something in a shop and filing it, Evernote is the best I have used
I hope I don't have to migrate to something else... but as a desktop user I was let down acouple of years ago when they re-architectured for their Version 10, switching from C++ to an Elektron framework I believe, and I'm probably going to be let down even more going forward.
Are there any good alternatives out there? Better still, good alternatives that can import an Evernote DB dump?
I re-considered Evernote recently because I haven't used it for so long. If I remember correctly it offered some useful means of sending full notes to other people, but I can't recall if it emulated FTP in some way.
Nevertheless, I found a freeware Windows App called NotesMan. I like it a lot. See the following 2 search results:
Download NotesMan - MajorGeeks
NotesMan is a simple, open-source, note-taking manager for Windows. NotesMan is a portable app, so you can always take it with you or easily back up the app. NotesMan can take multiple notes. You begin by clicking Add and naming your note. From there, it's as straightforward as editing any text document.
https://www.ghacks.net › 2020 › 09 › 04 › notesman-is-a-simple-and-open-source-note-taking-program-that-supports-autosave
NotesMan is a simple and open source note taking program that supports ...
NotesMan is a portable application. It is an open source tool written in Pascal. Aside from the lack of a warning about unsaved content, NotesMan is pretty good. The clutter-free GUI is nice, though it does come at the cost of the program being too simple.
Once I found NotesMan I gave up looking further. The portable app option is a good one for me. It is pretty simple to back up your notes.
Cheers to all and have a good Christmas in Europe (if that is possible).
Fraunt Hall in the frozen wilds of Western Canada
I think it's hilarious, in 2022, they have finally gotten around to implementing collaborative editing.
when a clan of Evernote Consultants realized they had no klout in the direction of Evernote (ie. how painful editing conflicts were & having to set up "rules" on who edits to use Evernote Business effectively - it was so backass backwards), a large majority of us jumped ship shortly after being certified in 2014!
Shame, I've been using Evernote since it was as standalone client - v1 point something (I still have the client and it still works). In those days their mantra was 'free for ever'. Unfortunately, when they introduced their paid tiers the lowest level was more than I could justify for my modest use and when they started restricting use I switched to OneNote - which I've never thought as good. Now I'm a heavy user but not about to go back.
I noticed recently that they have further restricted use - it used to be two (three?) devices plus any device for the web version. Now its two devices full stop. Looks like I'd better find a way to export my old notes in case they disappear!
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