That article includes some pertinent information that's not in the blog posting, though (which offices are closing, one of the products that's being discontinued).
Couldn't agree more. I remember when I first started using Evernote, the FAQs specifically said "you can't share your notes, that's not the point". Now it's all social and businessy, but I just want an easy and private way to organise my stuff!
> Couldn't agree more. I remember when I first started using Evernote, the FAQs specifically said "you can't share your notes, that's not the point". Now it's all social and businessy, but I just want an easy and private way to organise my stuff!
This[1] article makes the point that they realized they needed business users to make money, and they were trying to appeal to them.
Seconded. They pushed work chat pretty hard... Given what the CEO letter mentioned about product focus, I wonder if it's the employees that worked on that that are being let go
Half the comments here are "you can't just be a 'feature' or you'll get replaced by google/apple/MS" and the other half are "why are they trying to expand beyond the core feature?" Makes me glad I'm no CEO.
I think why news of layoffs is so disconcerting is that it can be really, really hard to differentiate between what's fat and what's muscle in the business. A lot of "cost centers" like development end up meaning a lot to brand perceptions, which isn't valued correctly in the traditional P&L hierarchy and can have a significant time lag.
As I understand the definition that people have been bandying about, Groupon can't be a dead unicorn because they managed to go public. To be a Unicorn you have to be a privately held and venture backed company with a valuation (from your investors) of over $1B.)
While GroupOn went public, and continues to this day, just as Zynga did.
Groupon is still worth a couple of billion despite the beating it's taken from investors. Its revenue and EBITDA have consistently climbed in each year since going public, and there is plenty of cash on hand without a single cent of debt.
That makes the bull side of the argument significantly stronger, especially given that N. American gross billings are up 12% year-over-year in the last quarter.
I have no financial position either way, and I'm not claiming everything is rosy for GRPN but it's very far from being a "dead unicorn" and at least by my analysis the stock is pretty undervalued at the moment.
Groupon's problem is with repeat business. I think they're still churning through naive businesses that don't understand the value proposition. If they can't get repeat customers then their upside is limited. I would be very wary of judging Groupon based purely on historic cashflow.
They are similar in that they haven't made anything note worthy in a while and their main product is really just a feature of bigger companies apps and services.
Building a feature is fine but that means you need to sell out then at some point or grow into new areas. Dropbox is not doing to good at moving into new areas and they are probably too big now to sell out easily.
Twitter's core product is still useful for a lot of people, it's just never going to be Facebook. It will eventually be bought by someone, probably Google.
Disagree about a lack of improvements. Some recent ones I'm a fan of: better handling of multimedia, better "quote tweet", polls, engagement metrics, and a bunch of UI improvements.
I don't expect it to disappear (not completely, not over night).
But they're burning through $130M+ a quarter and growth is stalling. They don't seem to have leadership with a vision of where to take the company from here.
Twitter still enjoys some cache with celebrities, but how much longer will that hold true?
So how will they stop bleeding? Maybe they'll transform Twitter into something profitable, or maybe they'll look to the 2,000+ engineers, and ask why they need so many.
The fundamental problem of the current market is that it's all sustained by VC injections and trivial revenue streams. No-one is prepared to pay for something like Twitter (or Tumblr, or, or...) because we've gotten used to the idea of Stuff For Free. But the model just isn't sustainable, particularly given the ongoing attack on the only (ad) revenue stream that these services do have.
Twitter isn't going anywhere, it just might not fulfil the high expectations of the later stage/ public investors. Worst case for Twitter is probably a massive acquisition by Facebook/Google/Microsoft.
Twitter is expanding its product offerings with Periscope and as of today's press releases is looking to expand past 140 characters.[1]
The curiosity is what becomes of the 2,000 engineers on staff. What is the break down in terms of their roles within the company, i.e. back-end, development, user-experience. When does the twitter back-end become a mature platform and you can start to wean down the number of engineers.
As an aside, I would love an app or system that will trace the origin of a story within the web eco-system. One comment from Re/Code is recounted / repackaged across the entire system.
Also, I was trying to find the original Periscope iterative development post through Google and Bing, no luck thanks to the two sites now integrating news into their search results.
File sync is a feature of the Google Suite, but Dropbox is much better than Google Drive. Dropbox gets a lot of subtle things right. Maybe in the long term you're right, but I'm not so sure.
I think Dropbox Teams is too expensive but I'm paying it anyway because I think it's that much better. (I think that's a sign they set the prices exactly right)
Dropbox problem is that it was obviously better several years ago so its user acquisition was easy.
Nowadays dropbox needs to convince user of other services that it is better. On paper though, dropbox provides less for more money - that's going to be difficult. I share your opinion - they are better. The reason I know is because I have been a client for years and they never let me down even in weird syncing scenario. Syncing quality is #1 feature of a cloud storage, you need to be able to trust it fully.
However, how do I convince a MS user that 1 TB from dropbox for 7.99 GBP/month is a better deal than 1 TB (actually 5 TB since it is 1 TB per user) + Office 365 + 60 Skype Minutes for 7.99 GBP/month ?
Dropbox is undeniably better. It gets synching right and this is so incredibly important. People should be rooting for Dropbox, not hoping for its demise. Everyone else has screwed up synching and screwing up synching means lost files! Lost photos of loved ones! Lost ideas, lost important documents! Dropbox is worth the price because it gets this right.
OneDrive for Business is a great example of screwed up sync. Whomever made the call to release that steaming pile should be flogged. Rumor has it they are finally fixing the broken sync client.
When the MS product guys were pretending that our network/workstation image was the reason that OneDrive sync broke, I took a laptop out of the box, put Windows 8 on it, streamed down Office ProPlus and signed in a dummy user with a small file tree. Then we wrote a script that created a text file and saved it to a directory every 3 hours. Than we left it. The client broke itself after 2-3 days with no user activity.
With Dropbox, I had a laptop in my basement that I forgot about for 3 years. I turned it on, signed into Dropbox, and it magically just worked. So sync issues. No conflicts.
> Rumor has it they are finally fixing the broken sync client.
It's already too late. They've shown they can't be trusted to sync files. It's ridiculous to me to even consider trusting them with my files. Dropbox actually has had a problem in the past but it was a bug they fixed immediately. They care about this so much.
>Everyone else has screwed up synching and screwing up synching means lost files! Lost photos of loved ones! Lost ideas, lost important documents! Dropbox is worth the price because it gets this right.
If they rely on Dropbox getting syncing right to not lose "important files, photos of loved ones, ideas and important documents" then they are doing it wrong.
They should backup anyway, and only then trust Dropbox for plain syncing. Dropbox is not backup.
You are not considering the implications of how synching works. How do you know you lost files? I back up with Time Machine, Time Machine runs every hour and creates a limited set of back ups I can go back to. Meanwhile if there's a synching problem and files get eaten by my file synching service Time Machine will happily assume those files were removed by me. One year later when I go to find some picture of my daughter I took and the file is gone you tell me what backup I go to to restore that file. You have 1 year's worth of hourly backups? I don't.
>You are not considering the implications of how synching works.
Actually it's because I'm considering it that I advocate this.
>How do you know you lost files?
You look for them and they can't be found. And keeping a tally and/or checksum per folder in your backup doesn't hurt either.
>Meanwhile if there's a synching problem and files get eaten by my file synching service Time Machine will happily assume those files were removed by me. One year later when I go to find some picture of my daughter I took and the file is gone you tell me what backup I go to to restore that file.
In your case it's simple, you can just go to Time Machine, as it archives all versions of the files, changed and/or deleted or not.
>You have 1 year's worth of hourly backups? I don't.
Actually with Time Machine you sort of have.
But, more essentially, you don't need "1 year's worth of hourly backups?", unless you're doing something very important and create new such files multiple times per day (e.g. if you're a business and store customer data, or a new site and you have your news database).
For stuff like "archived projects", "family pictures" or "music collection" just take incremental backups of them, and set your backup program to never delete any files during sync, but just put them in a "deleted" folder.
For stuff that changes fast, like working documents, emails and such, take backups with Time Machine (which happen in "real time"). Every few months take a full backup.
Besides network backup, never backup in just one external disk (and test your backup disks from time to time), and don't keep them in one place.
That is, if that stuff is very important to you. Some people can lose most of it, as it's mainly them hoarding digital BS.
If you're a business, OTOH, backup is PART of what you should do anyway.
Do OneDrive or Google have automatic file versioning? As in: you accidentally corrupt or save over an important file and 15-75 previous versions can be restored via the web interface?
I'm so reliant on this that I'm hacking together an automatic-commit scheme with git and a Linux server that syncs some important folders.
I'm curious: why do you feel Dropbox needs to make something new and noteworthy? Why can't it just stick to its knitting, and continue to offer something that works and people find valuable?
Why can't it just stick to its knitting, and continue to offer something that works and people find valuable?
Because now Google, Microsoft and Amazon offer it at a cheaper price and better integrated with their own products.
The broader answer here is "Dropbox took a bunch of VC money, so 'just doing well enough' isn't an option for them and they have to stop at nothing to grow faster"
For me, the key part of Dropbox isn't first-party support, it's that a bajillion third-party apps have cross-platform support for it where availability of other services is rather more piecemeal.
Dropbox third-party developer here. Their API and developer support is dogshit. They spent years screwing around with photos when they could've built a platform.
Notes-taking apps have the competition of <div contenteditable="true"/>. There isn't much left to do for a notes-taking app: Everything else is bells and whistles.
Responsibilities should be called here. Dropbox, Evernote, Slack and GitHub are all 4 hosting a massive free service, highly replaceable with cheap alternatives, with low switching costs. I sincerely hope the VCs who invest in those companies have another plan than "Add more features forever".
Can't take you seriously when you say Github is highly replaceable. Try and go hosting your open source project on some obscure hosted code repository, let me know when you get lots of contributors.
There was another article recently that said that files are old news and people are using Slack. Granted they are shipping files in that, but people have probably moved on to web hosted versions of documents anyway.
I tried Google Drive when it was launched. Used it a lot, but had tons of syncing issues. I ended up losing quite a bit of data.
Switched to Dropbox and haven't had a single sync issue since.
You're right that it's a service that is ridiculously simple in what it does, but right now, I can't imagine moving my 10GB+ of data to another platform.
Really? How so? I have about 60GB in total stored across Google Drive, OneDrive and DropBox. Other than OneDrive requiring me to login too frequently with the desktop folder syncing app they all work identically. I've yet to have an issue with syncing with any of them after editing documents in multiple machines.
I'm not saying you're wrong I just haven't seen what you might be referring to hence why I asked.
I actually like and use sheets (it's much better than Excel for simple and/or non-analytical use cases), so when I use Excel for something, it's because I want to use Excel for that thing.
This is going to sound stupid, but I think the major problems with Drive are the line height it uses for items within a directory and the fact that it has relatively short file pagination threshold.
I had thought that Drive was confusing, because I would "create" a Doc or a Spreadsheet in the root directory and then go back to look for it and not be able to find it. I created a Spreadsheet, and named it something starting with 'T'. This put it on the 3rd or 4th pagination request to get more files (these requests were ~1-2 seconds slow) in my root directory. But also the line height of all the files in the directory filled up so much vertical space that it felt like I was seeing most of the directory on page 1, even though it had much more content.
When I look at ~/ locally in Finder, Nautilus, etc. the line height is tight and there is no pagination. I can see everything I have access to instantly or within an immediate scroll. When I use Google Drive every file line item takes up a lot of vertical space and I have to page through results. The result is that I can't see everything and I feel as though things are missing, even though they aren't.
You are not crazy. The whole Google docs interface _is_ completely crazy. It's drives me nuts whenever I go in there and makes be frustrated because of what it could be if only they didn't have a complex about "not looking beautiful enough".
When reinstalling your system, try to install Drive into existing folder with the data. Nope, you have to choose a new folder and redownload everything[1]. While this is tolerable for small data accounts, I wouldn't trust them with couple hundred GBs.
While installing Dropbox it just syncs the difference and done.
[1]There is a workaround but you need to think about it before reinstalling the OS (saving some user data or something).
The issue I have with Dropbox is that their usage / pricing model is totally broken. If someone shares their folder with me, it shouldn't eat into my storage allocation.
Agreed, although it starts getting complicated if you put stuff in there too (do file creators pay? shared folders pay? what if that owner wants to drop out, can they re-elect someone else)? Anything but this method starts to get really complicated.
It's not that complicated. Have the user toggle an "I also claim ownership of this directory" flag before letting them edit it and have it count against their storage after that.
(No idea how difficult it would be to introduce this into their system, but conceptually it's a pretty easily surmounted problem.)
i hated that - one of the main reasons I don't use dropbox. Early on I had a bunch of clients all raving about how cool dropbox was - each sharing 200-500meg projects with me. Within days I'm hitting a 2gig limit, being encouraged to upgrade my account just to use a service someone else was forcing me to use. I use DB as little as possible.
DB is too big to fail. They are just everywhere at this point; I have rarely seen a technology that has managed to find itself into every corner of every industry, and be used by professionals at every technical-level. I have experienced the LEAST technical people asking me to use Dropbox. Dropbox is like if Email was owned by one company.
And why wouldn't they switch to MS or Google Drive? The migration costs don't seem overwhelming. Dropbox won't disappear, but it's not a beast you make it out to be.
Case in point: I'm a big fan of Excel and Word, it's a solid piece of software. But I haven't used it in over a year, all my stuff sits with Google Docs/Sheets. Excel won't disappear (extremely popular in finance with VBA) but for most users there's no difference and little switching costs.
Personally, I don't want them to make anything noteworthy. I want them to make something subtle, unobtrusive, and as reliable as gravity. I've been using them 3 or 4 years now and as far as I'm concerned, they're my favorite vendor.
Google and Amazon keep screwing with things because they have a complicated global-dominance ecosystem that they're trying to build. I don't trust them with my files. But Dropbox keeps doing what they're doing with only modest, incremental improvements (that gradually add up). As long as they keep things solid, I'll keep using and recommending them.
I hear ya. But how much $$ have they made from us to keep the servers running? Sometimes it feels like my data could vanish at any time...
I've started looking into ownCloud and the like lately as I'm just getting tired of offloading critical storage to something that may prove transient.
I don't know about other people, but I'm paying them $100/year for disk space that costs them under $15. Which is fine by me; I'm paying them for the seamless sync and the reliability.
Literally the only thing that keeps me paying for Dropbox, instead of completely abandoning it for OneDrive, is that OneDrive doesn't have a Linux client. And much of the OneDrive functionality (for example, the photo organiser) is a hell of a lot better.
I'm an edge case, and the case (Linux support) doesn't bode well for DropBox.
Do you have a source for that? Closing the API seems crazy, since if done right it should provide far more value at far less cost to the Evernote team than many other features. Will this mean that all the 'Share to Evernote' integrations from email clients and other apps will cease to function?
Wow that's rough. Taiwan is in the middle of a Typhoon lashing. Hope the people in their Taiwan office is doing ok through this traumatic event - at a time when most would be relying on their business life to carry them through the physical disasters.
> Evernote’s strength is in its core: notes, sync, and search. That’s where we’re going to focus.
Well, like many others, I've been wishing Evernote would drop all the auxiliary stuff and focus on their core product. Hopefully that's exactly what will now happen. Evernote has become an absolutely critical part of my life. Even though I use it for business (along with everything else) though, I have no use for the majority of the new features they've added over the past few years. Of course, not every feature will be useful to everyone, and just because I don't use something doesn't mean it shouldn't exist. However, when you see significant bugs languish for years while niche features get priority, it suggests a problem. I really hope this signifies a change in direction (as opposed to a milestone in the current, downward, one).
I'm hoping they're dropping the idea of chat. Spending time on that really never made much sense me when their core product is so strong but badly needs some features to better align with modern tech trends such as improved plain text and markdown support.
Yes, 1000 times yes! I so wish I could author in Evernote using markdown. Getting any sort of rich text done in a note is extremely cumbersome in Evernote, lists for instance.
I made a feature request quite a long time ago for LaTeX math support. Every few months another person +1s the suggestion. I don't get the sense that they really take the suggestions on the forum particularly seriously.
Markdown support has been a common feature request for years, with many feature requests in their forums as well as entire blog posts from fairly prominent bloggers – just try googling "Evernote markdown support".
I've had the strong suspicion for a long time now that they simply aren't listening to these sorts of feature requests that don't tie into their enterprise/business focus – at least since about 2013.
I will guiltily admit that Ctrl+Shift+U is hard coded into my finger DNA - I use Evernote for every meeting, every discussion we have, and quickly creating lists (or getting out of list mode) is actually one thing I like about evernote.
I mostly use Evernote on my iOS devices. While I do have a keyboard for my iPad, I am not sure that works there, but I'll give it a go. Ultimately, though, markdown support would be my ideal so that I don't have to learn a new set of key combinations. I already know emacs ;) Plus markdown is easier to use than a key combination like that (IMO of course).
I don't know what they've dropped, but a few auxiliary features I personally don't use are Skitch, Hello, and Work Chat. I'm sure some people do use them (although I expect few compared to the core product). But everyone uses the editor, and there are significant bugs there that have literally gone unfixed for years. That said, some have been fixed in the past couple months, which is part of why I'm hopeful about this new direction.
Totally, and I definitely get that just because I don't personally use something, it doesn't mean it isn't useful. I don't object to any current features continuing to exist. ("Drop" was poor wording.) I would just like to see them focus on bug fixes and the core experience in general over adding _more_ new stuff.
I use Skitch daily... but I don't sync it to Evernote, usually just to screenshot, annotate and dump the marked up image into Slack or an email, I don't use it for anything I want to persist. Other than the sync aspect in the interface I hardly notice it's an Evernote product at all. I could get by with Preview.app and Grab, but Skitch's obnoxious default pink arrows and widely stroked text are perfect for calling out visual errors on projects.
Likewise, I use Evernote Scannable every so often without connecting to Evernote because it's a really good scanner app. Exports and emails images without any fuss.
I'd be perfectly happy if both apps were spun [back] off into their own entities too. Evernote as a note taking company doesn't do anything for me, but they do have other nice products.
I use Scannable _extensively_. Being able to search the text in handwritten documents and whiteboards - without losing the original document to some ridiculous OCR conversion - is absolutely gold. Plain text notes are somewhat less important for me, although I use them a lot too.
I know that there's a lot of groupthink in the VC community, and so CEOs aren't always selected strictly on merit. But even I, with no executive experience whatsoever, would know not to OK something like that.
As Saint Steven once put it:
I'm actually as proud of the things
we haven't done as the things I have done.
Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.
Why didn't this dialog take place in a board meeting?
CEO: thanks for the hundreds of millions of
dollars you've invested in us. Here's something
new we've done. We're putting your money
to good use.
WE HAVE SOCKS FOR SALE!!!
non-spineless Board of Directors:
That's great.
Let's all just go back to your office and help you
clean out your desk. Then we'll escort you out of
the building and the rest of us will reconvene to
discuss finding a better steward for the hundreds
of millions of dollars we've given you.
IMO startups that aren't making money and that keep having to do rounds of financing need to, most of all, FOCUS. Evernote board should be chanting: FOCUS! FOCUS! FOCUS!
I'm pretty sure it came from branching out into workspace inventory, like monitor stands, and then jumped into business accessories, like laptop bags and (yes) socks.
The margins are already so thick that they probably only had to sell a few to break even.
But I do think, this is precisely the point they are trying to fix. They all seem like logical moves in themselves, but when you look at them in combination, it's clear an overarching strategy is lacking. From Socks to Evernote Business to Recepie capture..
I believe they got rid of their Food app recently. I'd be so grateful if they ditched Chat (or at least gave options to remove it from all platforms) and accepted that even if we it for work, some of it use it in a personal capacity that does not benefit from social aspects at all.
I found it useful, the evernote browser exception let's you save recipes without the crap and the food app let's you quickly find them and it kept the screen on while you were cooking.
It would also be a huge plus if it didn't take 5 seconds to load every time I opened the app. Not sure how a company with so many competitors can survive long-term with its product in such a state.
Everything about Evernote seems to get slower and slower; I hardly use it at all anymore for that reason. Even the browser plugin to save webpages is glacial, and that was a big reason I started with Evernote in the first place.
Agreed; Google Keep has become my preference for immediate note taking. I think a major factor in Evernote's long-term survival is the friction of switching to a competitor (in conjunction with getting a lot of early traction with power-users).
Google notebook was amazing! But at the very least, they did export all notebook notes to Google docs, so it wasn't like they completely binned all user data.
What I find missing is a native Windows client. For me, "immediate" note taking means that I just hit ctrl-alt-N (or click Evernote icon in a tray), and I am immediately writing. In Google Keep, you basically need to visit a webpage, which is just not immediate. Or you use it only on mobile device?
I've gone the other way (Keep to Evernote). I need a cross platform solution, and with any significant amount of data the Keep webapp is practically unusable on my iPad. If they had released a native iOS version, I probably wouldn't have switched.
More often than it should. This is a huge problem with current companies and their products - they depend too much on the Internet connection, because a combination of lazy (or deadline-pressured) authors and executives trying to monetize absolutely anything.
The newest version of the Android app is actually a huge improvement here. It's now possible to launch a quick note from the desktop basically instantaneously. (It probably averages 0.3 seconds on my Galaxy S6.) Hopefully a sign of things to come.
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... 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 know that it is the common vernacular, but you didn't let them go, you fired them. Surely they would prefer to not go and continue to pay their mortgage.
I'm sure it wasn't easy to fire them, but don't try and make the situation rosey. The folks who decided on the direction of the company decided wrong and now they have to fire the people who executed those decision.
I've always found it striking to note how laid off has migrated over time. When my grandfather got laid off, there was an expectation that he would come back to the same job with the same company some time in the near future.
When I get laid off there is no expectation that my job will come back.
Companies like Boeing (who have boom and bust years) still use the term "laid off" like that. But they're also union jobs where you basically can't get fired, short of taking a piss in the coffeemaker. So the word "fired" is still fine for those employees "exceptional" enough to get permanently laid off.
that's exactly right - factories in town use to lay off workers seasonally, then call them back in later.
Can't put my finger on when exactly, but during one of our recessions they stopped getting called back, and then companies started to realize once the local union was busted they could hire new workers at a fraction of the price, and...here you are.
I disagree, and I think Evernote engineers would be making a huge mistake if they tell future interviewers they got "fired" instead of "laid off." Maybe not to you, but to many people "fired" implies wrongdoing on the part of the employee.
Meh ... I just think the issue is just so sensitive that it moves through the euphemism treadmill a lot faster.
When I was growing up, it felt like there was a clear distinction between "fired" (with cause) and "laid off" (bad revenues, can't afford you). But over time I increasingly saw people refer to all terminations as being "laid off".
Then "let go" entered the fray, and I heard of recruiters who told people to refer to any for-cause firing as "being let go".
Whatever term you use on this, people will abuse until it doesn't mean that anymore. They want to make it sound like any termination wasn't for-cause, while having plausible deniability if anyone calls them on it.
And yes, I know the usual ivory tower lecture about "that's how language normally works!" But normally it's slow enough that you can reasonably infer what someone means because of mutual knowledge of what the words mean. Not here. And probably, not ever.
I agree - "Fired" clearly implies wrong-doing. I never had a problem firing people who deserved it (and met HR's thresholds for firing). On the other hand, the worst thing I ever had to do is lay people off (who were working hard) because the company's fortunes had declined and we couldn't afford to pay them.
What made it worse was the morning of the lay-off, one of them told me a joke: "What's the difference between a recession and a depression? A recession is when your neighbor loses his job, a depression is when you lose yours". You know why a good manager goes into his office and closes the door after executing the "terminations"? In my case, it was to hide the fact that I was crying.
"Fir[ing]" an employee suggests they did something wrong. These 47 people did nothing wrong outside of working on a product or products that are no longer relevant to Evernote.
I suppose it can mean that, but in practice, it doesn't. Being fired and being laid off are very different things in this year's English.
So different, in fact, that I have been "laid off" when the employer really had a mind to fire me for poor performance but wanted to avoid hurting my future prospects.
I think the wording used by the new CEO shows his attitude to the company. Reading the announcement, he is very much focusing on making more money for Evernote. There are no details on how those 47 people will be assisted post Evernote. It reads like the CEO really fired them.
But layoffs often come from above as "fire the worst 20% or your team so we can get lean." So in that case the employee does play a part.
The problem with these moves is that the top 20% often see the writing on the wall and leave shortly after. Then the second 20% start testing the waters. Then...
"Fired" or "terminated" tends to imply for cause which is something different from what's happening here. I'd prefer "laid off", but I think "let go" is pretty unambiguous.
Depends on the dictionary. Some will also clarify that "with cause" is a big part of it. Or just look at the etymology. It means they've been forcibly ejected from the company. Like a cannonball. You don't do that to employees you'll miss.
I've tried evernote as a consumer and couldn't quite figure out where it fits between dropbox and other "cloud" providers such as gDrive and MSOffice 360.
It seems like a smart move to focus on the features that are most useful to their core users instead of trying to be everything to everybody.
The real question is - will Chris O’Neill listen to what core paying users have been asking for with regard to keeping the basic application functional.
Evernote is a note taking app in 2015. While slack and hipchat are somewhat iconoclastic, they have network affects and boost productivity. Evernote is competing with apple notes, google docs, whatever microsoft has, every password keeping app, a notebook, a text editor and using a blog. This is something that will likely happen to dropbox and box. You provide storage. Simple math will provide you with the cost of storage in 5 years and it is not a lot. Further, similar to evernote, it solved a problem that had a lot of friction and was novel a few years ago, but is standard now.
Syncing. This is a default piece of all browsers, the 2 main operating systems win/os x, and comes standard on most phones. This is like the browser, you can have it for free so you stay in our ecosystem. Mega GIVES you 50GB of storage completely free NOW, and it is likely more secure. I don't know enterprise as well as I know consumer, but at some point I would imagine the choice is between buying a few SSDs and having an internal server, or setting up your own secure system via VPN. There can't be much room for this.
I am sure. However, like evernote the difficult problem they solved several years ago is no longer difficult, but quite easy and become much more cheap. Couple that with security and privacy risks and the value proposition changes quickly.
Maybe they are gearing up for a google merger or something. They are doing their mailbox app which looks cool and integrates storage and syncing. However, once again
1. Why would I use a mail client that only interfaces with gmail and outlook?
2. What is the point of the sync, this is default by most mail providers and clients?
3. Why would I want mail storage? I actually don't know what my mailbox limit is, but I certainly would not want to have the amount of .txt documents that could fill that up. Also, this is basic functionality. You can't pull me on your platform, google has the users you want and are better positioned, I still don't understand how you make money as a company.
When did file sync become easy? I agree it's become commonplace with Google Drive and iCloud bringing respectable implementations to market, but I think it's still far from easy.
It's easy from a consumer point of view in the sense that it's readily available and easy to set up. The fact that it is still technically difficult to set up from scratch doesn't matter to consumers (or businesses) when there are multiple providers that hide that complexity for the end user. Hence Dropbox no longer has a competitive advantage from having produced a solid solution to a difficult problem.
Right, except the stories of data loss are an order of magnitude more common with Google Drive and iCloud compared to Dropbox, so even though at the surface level it may be a classic market for lemons, I still think Dropbox has a competitive advantage based on their reputation.
Microsoft has OneNote, which might be a good cautionary tale in this area. OneNote was once the king of note taking, like back in 2003, and it's still a great product. But Microsoft focused too much on the Business market, I think, dropping OneNote from the Office Home packages, and that kind of killed it outside of the corp world.
It is, and is integrated well with the Surface and the Surface pen. Works great for taking handwritten (or typed) notes and having it sync to my phone/desktop immediately. I use it often to take notes at meetings then I am able to send all the notes/diagrams to others in pdf form when I get back to my workstation.
I was totally unaware of OneNote until it came with Windows 7 Enterprise at my first corporate job. I couldn't believe how great it was (at least on desktop), but I was too deep into Evernote by that point to make the switch.
How do you mean? According to Wikipedia OneNote was launched in 2003, and has been part of the Home and Student editions of Office 2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016.
I've only really known about OneNote since it came bundled with Windows 8/on the Surface RT I got at work.
It seems like a fairly good product, although I really only use it for bookmarking tabs that Chrome seems to lose when it crashes/updates itself and nukes the "recently closed tabs" list.
OneNote is now completely free and available on iOS as well (where it has a full 5-star rating). As much I love Evernote, it's going to be an uphill battle for them.
(And not to mention the handwriting experience and integration with the Surface Pen - which are killer features for students)
Nice thing is that the desktop app can sync/save copies locally and does private backups, but you can also save/sync and store data in OneDrive, private server, or corporate internet via a samaba share (Free version only syncs to OneDrive, but IIRC does local backup in desktop app).
Architecturally it's a very impressive product and makes some pretty creative uses of the windows folder hierarchy to get it's job done.
I think OneNote was built with a crashfirst mentality - It is very hard to lose data w/ it. Their QA team is damn impressive too, I've been a follower of theirs for a while.
My only complaint is the lack of true real-time sharing ala google docs's Operational Transform (they didn't exist when it was made), but it does come close. Opening a shared notebook in class and having everyone collaborate on the note was an awesome experience.
It's inking support blows everything out of the water IMHO. It also has a lot of the advanced automation features you can access by integrating OneTastic.
Only real issue I've ran into is that it gets to be a pain to print with as it has some wonky scaling features and the page layout feels like an after thought.
It is also hard to get groups of people to use it effectively because it is basically a WIKI and needs to have the same kind of discipline / habits to make it usable.
If they can do inking support with Operational Transforms, they may be able to have a replay feature without even trying - something that many teachers seem to really want out of the product.
My friend and I love the product so much we've been trying to make our own online version with inking support w/ paper.js share.js, github, and localstorage.
It has really good pen/stylus support. It has completely replaced handwritten notes for me.
However, although it's amazing compared to a pen and paper it's still incredibly frustrating to work with.
* It can't handle large amounts of handwriting without igniting relatively powerful computers
* It crashes constantly when trying to balance pen input with palm rejection
* Syncing doesn't really work with non-trivial merging and doesn't handle sync errors nor errors in general well -- all of these usually end up with handwriting layered on top of itself
* Syncing is basically out of your control, you can't do partial syncs when you really need a section/page fast, and large notebooks with handwriting can take hours to sync completely. I've basically resigned to splitting my notes into many smaller notebooks.
* Handwriting on the "Desktop" version is a complete joke and so you're constantly switching between the that and the app to get good handwriting and more features.
So it's great, until it doesn't work then it's a nightmare.
OneNote works fairly well on Windows. The main issue I have with it is usability.
Performance on Macs and iOS is fairly terrible though, from syncing lag, to input lag, (on an iPhone 6) to long load times.
I used to love OneNote's writing experience - but it sucked hard at syncing data between devices. That was what Evernote absolutely nailed from the get go. They synced data seamlessly before anyone else, and ultimately that ended up being more important to me than the UX. Now, in 2015, I feel like Evernote has scratched the UX itch enough for me that I have no reason to go back to OneNote for the forseeable future. Penultimate provides a decent UX for writing even if not as sophisticated as OneNote, Scannable is brilliant for pulling things in via the camera, and the core note-taking app is perfectly adequate, IMO.
My working theory regarding OneNote is that it is a peculiarity of Australians. The only people I know that use it are Australian so maybe they have it on the national curriculum there instead of something like 'spelling'.
I love what OneNote can do, the ability to record meeting video or capture a whiteboard talk with a smart board is magical. But I can't use it day to day.
Managing notebooks, tabs and pages is a real pain. I end up with a sprawling OneNote notebook that gets lost in the sprawl of OneDrive/SharePoint.
same here, ive been using it for two years now and it so tedious to organise stuff on the metro app that i just dont bother, so everything is a mess atm
OneNote is a great MS product that they've totally failed to market. My wife uses it extensively; the drawing capture features integrate nicely with the Surface.
I think that a single-purpose app or service can survive in a world full of multi-featured competitors, but it needs to be insanely good at what it does in order to do so. Evernote is not insanely good at notetaking, and therein lies the problem.
Agreed, but it is insanely better than anything else I've ever tried.
(I haven't tried that many things, but really I don't know of any decent competitor that runs well on multiple platforms, and does the basic things I need - which is text notes, other file types, and ability to tag and put into a notebook. And on a native app).
Your thesis is correct (single purpose app can survive in a world full of multi-featured competitors by being insanely good at one thing). But I disagree with your interpretation. Evernote is THE multi-featured competitor in notetaking arena. It does too many things, each of them in mediocre manner. Then comes all the "single-purpose apps that are insanely good at one thing only" which disrupt Evernote. Think of Instapaper (Saving webpages), Simplenote (Text syncing), All kinds of TODO apps, they all are good at one thing and do it well. That's why Evernote is not doing well.
Ah, the death of a unicorn. The operational end is doing fine: "Our paid subscription growth is very strong and almost entirely organic; the number of new paid subscribers is 40% higher than this time last year." But the hype has faded, the $1bn valuation is down, and there's no greater fool available to fund them.
This is a problem with too much funding. You have to pay off the investors, which requires rapid growth, which often requires buying market share at a loss.
Anyone know which offices? How many employees does Evernote have? Were layoffs mostly from closed offices?
Edit: the Business Insider article (which maybe should be retained as the link?) has some of the information: 13% of workforce let go. Taiwan, Singapore, and Moscow offices closing. I couldn't tell if the 47 were from these offices mostly. I wouldn't think a note-taking app/website would need to be too dispersed around the world.
I started out with Evernote, but had issues with multi-device sync (I think that when faced with anything that even remotely resembled a conflict it would just duplicate the note). Actually started using OneNote and have been very happy with it!
Evernote's former CEO promised to focus on core features last year[0]. After 18 months with no improvements, the new CEO makes the same promise of focusing on core features. Seems like a sinking ship to me.
Yeah really, ease up there buddy. How about the steam engine, the cotton gin, the printing press, the computer, etc. I would argue more important than Evernote.
Evernote feels like the Microsoft Office of the Notetaking world: it's huge, it's bloated, and it seems to be continuing to focus on stuff that the vast majority of its userbase will never use.
At some point I installed Google Keep, which is lightweight, easy to use, and syncs, without feeling like I just installed an entire suite simply to jot down some quick notes.
Last time I tried Google Keep is too simple for my taste. It maybe a good todo list to post-it note maker, but not for permanently notes that have reference value.
From my perspective (as a UX'er). I'm seeing more and more projects & organisations need a 'vision' of what the product should be to help them focus product/feature efforts. There seems to be an underlying 'enabling' of superfluous dev effort due to the proliferation & ease of user of stacks/libraries/platforms.
More so, VC funding and the push to become highly valued (gotta win that unicorn lottery) drives scope and feature bloat. Every company has to grow, grow grow. Every product has to expand and scale up until it's everything to all people.
Compare and contrast this with, say, craigslist, which still only has a few dozen employees. There's nothing wrong with keeping a product tightly scoped and keeping a business highly efficient and consistently profitable year after year, decade after decade. Maybe you don't get to ride the unicorn train, but maybe instead you get to work on something that you own (or own a big part of) and can enjoy your job consistently.
I wonder how effective their free to paid conversion is. I have never felt the need to move off the free account. I liked OneNote better but it didn't have the same reach as evernote at the time.
Maybe now they'll fix sync and iPhone editing? I've pretty much stopped using Evernote because the whole point was universally synced notes and todo lists but every time I would edit something on my iPhone I both had to deal with the formatting bugs in the iPhone editor AND the very high likelihood I'd end up with a "Conflicting Modifications" regardless of how many times I clicked sync.
As a paying customer it's been very frustrating to see "business" features like note sharing and chat consuming valuable resources while the reason I bought the product, managing notes and todo lists, becomes increasing unusable.
"Making great products means making difficult decisions," says Evernote CEO Phil Libin. "Our choice was between great user experience, and new features. We are proud to announce that our next release will have many new and exciting features."
I've been a stalwart supporter of Evernote for quite some time now. I've pushed through when feeling like the platform got slower and slower as time went by. I pushed through when it felt like their focus was scattered, like the core offering was being surpassed by other platforms.
Two months ago I pretty much decided 'ok you know what. This is it' after waiting for 25 seconds to get a note back that then turned out to be mysteriously 'missing'.
It happens, right. I get it. And I got it back with some support. But the focus wasn't there, and the platform got old.
Wind the clock back a year and a half (maybe two?) and Evernote was unstoppable compared to the competition.
Now? It's stale. Slow. Predictable and uninspiring.
While reading letters of layoffs is almost always a depressing thing, I sincerely hope that the 'focus' which they speak of is real. That everything, and I mean everything, gets dropped except making the core product as amazing as it once was.
If they do that, I'll come back in a heartbeat. I'll come back with dollar bills.
Ah, this explains all the notifications I've been getting trying to get me to go premium. Not that it's a big deal—I can't blame them for trying to monetize—but I had noticed they'd gotten a lot more aggressive lately.
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[ 600 ms ] story [ 2321 ms ] threadWho on earth needs features like "work chat"?
This[1] article makes the point that they realized they needed business users to make money, and they were trying to appeal to them.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com.au/evernote-the-first-dead-un...
They want to create a network effect to justify their valuation.
Otherwise it's just a competitor to OneNote, and why is that worth a billion dollars.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10218915
(Note: The BusinessInsider article was a re-publication of the original on syrah.co.)
My vote is for Fab, which went from $1B to effectively $0.
[1] https://www.google.com/?q=GRPN
While GroupOn went public, and continues to this day, just as Zynga did.
As usual, the Motley Fool's analysis is excellent: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/04/07/bull-vs-bea...
I have no financial position either way, and I'm not claiming everything is rosy for GRPN but it's very far from being a "dead unicorn" and at least by my analysis the stock is pretty undervalued at the moment.
They are similar in that they haven't made anything note worthy in a while and their main product is really just a feature of bigger companies apps and services.
2k+ engineers on staff without notable improvements to the core user-facing product in a while.
Declining signups, declining engagement.
Nobody stepping into the permanent CEO role.
I don't see how this ends well.
But they're burning through $130M+ a quarter and growth is stalling. They don't seem to have leadership with a vision of where to take the company from here.
Twitter still enjoys some cache with celebrities, but how much longer will that hold true?
So how will they stop bleeding? Maybe they'll transform Twitter into something profitable, or maybe they'll look to the 2,000+ engineers, and ask why they need so many.
The curiosity is what becomes of the 2,000 engineers on staff. What is the break down in terms of their roles within the company, i.e. back-end, development, user-experience. When does the twitter back-end become a mature platform and you can start to wean down the number of engineers.
As an aside, I would love an app or system that will trace the origin of a story within the web eco-system. One comment from Re/Code is recounted / repackaged across the entire system.
Also, I was trying to find the original Periscope iterative development post through Google and Bing, no luck thanks to the two sites now integrating news into their search results.
1. http://recode.net/2015/09/29/twitter-plans-to-go-beyond-its-...
I think Dropbox Teams is too expensive but I'm paying it anyway because I think it's that much better. (I think that's a sign they set the prices exactly right)
Nowadays dropbox needs to convince user of other services that it is better. On paper though, dropbox provides less for more money - that's going to be difficult. I share your opinion - they are better. The reason I know is because I have been a client for years and they never let me down even in weird syncing scenario. Syncing quality is #1 feature of a cloud storage, you need to be able to trust it fully.
However, how do I convince a MS user that 1 TB from dropbox for 7.99 GBP/month is a better deal than 1 TB (actually 5 TB since it is 1 TB per user) + Office 365 + 60 Skype Minutes for 7.99 GBP/month ?
OneDrive for Business is a great example of screwed up sync. Whomever made the call to release that steaming pile should be flogged. Rumor has it they are finally fixing the broken sync client.
When the MS product guys were pretending that our network/workstation image was the reason that OneDrive sync broke, I took a laptop out of the box, put Windows 8 on it, streamed down Office ProPlus and signed in a dummy user with a small file tree. Then we wrote a script that created a text file and saved it to a directory every 3 hours. Than we left it. The client broke itself after 2-3 days with no user activity.
With Dropbox, I had a laptop in my basement that I forgot about for 3 years. I turned it on, signed into Dropbox, and it magically just worked. So sync issues. No conflicts.
It's already too late. They've shown they can't be trusted to sync files. It's ridiculous to me to even consider trusting them with my files. Dropbox actually has had a problem in the past but it was a bug they fixed immediately. They care about this so much.
If they rely on Dropbox getting syncing right to not lose "important files, photos of loved ones, ideas and important documents" then they are doing it wrong.
They should backup anyway, and only then trust Dropbox for plain syncing. Dropbox is not backup.
Actually it's because I'm considering it that I advocate this.
>How do you know you lost files?
You look for them and they can't be found. And keeping a tally and/or checksum per folder in your backup doesn't hurt either.
>Meanwhile if there's a synching problem and files get eaten by my file synching service Time Machine will happily assume those files were removed by me. One year later when I go to find some picture of my daughter I took and the file is gone you tell me what backup I go to to restore that file.
In your case it's simple, you can just go to Time Machine, as it archives all versions of the files, changed and/or deleted or not.
>You have 1 year's worth of hourly backups? I don't.
Actually with Time Machine you sort of have.
But, more essentially, you don't need "1 year's worth of hourly backups?", unless you're doing something very important and create new such files multiple times per day (e.g. if you're a business and store customer data, or a new site and you have your news database).
For stuff like "archived projects", "family pictures" or "music collection" just take incremental backups of them, and set your backup program to never delete any files during sync, but just put them in a "deleted" folder.
For stuff that changes fast, like working documents, emails and such, take backups with Time Machine (which happen in "real time"). Every few months take a full backup.
Besides network backup, never backup in just one external disk (and test your backup disks from time to time), and don't keep them in one place.
That is, if that stuff is very important to you. Some people can lose most of it, as it's mainly them hoarding digital BS.
If you're a business, OTOH, backup is PART of what you should do anyway.
I'm so reliant on this that I'm hacking together an automatic-commit scheme with git and a Linux server that syncs some important folders.
Because now Google, Microsoft and Amazon offer it at a cheaper price and better integrated with their own products.
The broader answer here is "Dropbox took a bunch of VC money, so 'just doing well enough' isn't an option for them and they have to stop at nothing to grow faster"
For me, the key part of Dropbox isn't first-party support, it's that a bajillion third-party apps have cross-platform support for it where availability of other services is rather more piecemeal.
Notes-taking apps have the competition of <div contenteditable="true"/>. There isn't much left to do for a notes-taking app: Everything else is bells and whistles.
Responsibilities should be called here. Dropbox, Evernote, Slack and GitHub are all 4 hosting a massive free service, highly replaceable with cheap alternatives, with low switching costs. I sincerely hope the VCs who invest in those companies have another plan than "Add more features forever".
Open Source projects existed a long time before GitHub, and will exist a long time after the cool kids abandoned it for whatever reason.
But the private repos and the on-site offering - the things people pay for? Fair bit of competition there.
And in a half-assed way syncing.
There was another article recently that said that files are old news and people are using Slack. Granted they are shipping files in that, but people have probably moved on to web hosted versions of documents anyway.
Switched to Dropbox and haven't had a single sync issue since.
You're right that it's a service that is ridiculously simple in what it does, but right now, I can't imagine moving my 10GB+ of data to another platform.
I'm not saying you're wrong I just haven't seen what you might be referring to hence why I asked.
I had thought that Drive was confusing, because I would "create" a Doc or a Spreadsheet in the root directory and then go back to look for it and not be able to find it. I created a Spreadsheet, and named it something starting with 'T'. This put it on the 3rd or 4th pagination request to get more files (these requests were ~1-2 seconds slow) in my root directory. But also the line height of all the files in the directory filled up so much vertical space that it felt like I was seeing most of the directory on page 1, even though it had much more content.
When I look at ~/ locally in Finder, Nautilus, etc. the line height is tight and there is no pagination. I can see everything I have access to instantly or within an immediate scroll. When I use Google Drive every file line item takes up a lot of vertical space and I have to page through results. The result is that I can't see everything and I feel as though things are missing, even though they aren't.
Its material design. It's just bad.
While installing Dropbox it just syncs the difference and done.
[1]There is a workaround but you need to think about it before reinstalling the OS (saving some user data or something).
Any Dropbox killer will let you port over your Dropbox folder to its servers.
(No idea how difficult it would be to introduce this into their system, but conceptually it's a pretty easily surmounted problem.)
Case in point: I'm a big fan of Excel and Word, it's a solid piece of software. But I haven't used it in over a year, all my stuff sits with Google Docs/Sheets. Excel won't disappear (extremely popular in finance with VBA) but for most users there's no difference and little switching costs.
Google and Amazon keep screwing with things because they have a complicated global-dominance ecosystem that they're trying to build. I don't trust them with my files. But Dropbox keeps doing what they're doing with only modest, incremental improvements (that gradually add up). As long as they keep things solid, I'll keep using and recommending them.
I'm an edge case, and the case (Linux support) doesn't bode well for DropBox.
https://twitter.com/evernote_dev/status/650089211844890624 https://twitter.com/evernotehelps/status/650086523719671808
Well, like many others, I've been wishing Evernote would drop all the auxiliary stuff and focus on their core product. Hopefully that's exactly what will now happen. Evernote has become an absolutely critical part of my life. Even though I use it for business (along with everything else) though, I have no use for the majority of the new features they've added over the past few years. Of course, not every feature will be useful to everyone, and just because I don't use something doesn't mean it shouldn't exist. However, when you see significant bugs languish for years while niche features get priority, it suggests a problem. I really hope this signifies a change in direction (as opposed to a milestone in the current, downward, one).
Genuinely curious. I've noted that they seem to have multiple apps in the AppStore doing similar things.
Yes, 1000 times yes! I so wish I could author in Evernote using markdown. Getting any sort of rich text done in a note is extremely cumbersome in Evernote, lists for instance.
I've had the strong suspicion for a long time now that they simply aren't listening to these sorts of feature requests that don't tie into their enterprise/business focus – at least since about 2013.
We do not support markdown but have created an API that lets third party developers provide markdown support.
One really good example is www.marxi.co
Likewise, I use Evernote Scannable every so often without connecting to Evernote because it's a really good scanner app. Exports and emails images without any fuss.
I'd be perfectly happy if both apps were spun [back] off into their own entities too. Evernote as a note taking company doesn't do anything for me, but they do have other nice products.
I don't care one whit about chat.
https://www.evernote.com/market/feature/socks-en_CA?sku=SOCK...
Too much VC money sloshing around.
I know that there's a lot of groupthink in the VC community, and so CEOs aren't always selected strictly on merit. But even I, with no executive experience whatsoever, would know not to OK something like that.
As Saint Steven once put it:
Why didn't this dialog take place in a board meeting? Edit: just to emphasize, the quote above was from Jobs discussing focus: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/629613-people-think-focus-me...IMO startups that aren't making money and that keep having to do rounds of financing need to, most of all, FOCUS. Evernote board should be chanting: FOCUS! FOCUS! FOCUS!
The margins are already so thick that they probably only had to sell a few to break even.
But it looks like they found out themselves, eventually... ;)
I love Google Keep as is.
You mean like this?
https://itunes.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1029207872?mt=8
(And it doesn't actually travel to space unless you're on a satellite connection.)
I wrote a little more about DTP here: http://jakeseliger.com/2010/11/12/scrivener-or-devonthink-pr... , though I understand that some people use Evernote differently than DTP.
Except for a native linux client :(
I'm sure it wasn't easy to fire them, but don't try and make the situation rosey. The folks who decided on the direction of the company decided wrong and now they have to fire the people who executed those decision.
Edit: Would you all prefer the word "Terminated"?
"Fired" implies wrong-doing on their part.
"Laid off" or "let them go" means the company couldn't afford to pay them, or didn't need them anymore. It leaves no black mark against their name.
When I get laid off there is no expectation that my job will come back.
Can't put my finger on when exactly, but during one of our recessions they stopped getting called back, and then companies started to realize once the local union was busted they could hire new workers at a fraction of the price, and...here you are.
When I was growing up, it felt like there was a clear distinction between "fired" (with cause) and "laid off" (bad revenues, can't afford you). But over time I increasingly saw people refer to all terminations as being "laid off".
Then "let go" entered the fray, and I heard of recruiters who told people to refer to any for-cause firing as "being let go".
Whatever term you use on this, people will abuse until it doesn't mean that anymore. They want to make it sound like any termination wasn't for-cause, while having plausible deniability if anyone calls them on it.
And yes, I know the usual ivory tower lecture about "that's how language normally works!" But normally it's slow enough that you can reasonably infer what someone means because of mutual knowledge of what the words mean. Not here. And probably, not ever.
What made it worse was the morning of the lay-off, one of them told me a joke: "What's the difference between a recession and a depression? A recession is when your neighbor loses his job, a depression is when you lose yours". You know why a good manager goes into his office and closes the door after executing the "terminations"? In my case, it was to hide the fact that I was crying.
So different, in fact, that I have been "laid off" when the employer really had a mind to fire me for poor performance but wanted to avoid hurting my future prospects.
Here, don't take my word for it:
https://www.google.com/search?q=fired+laid+off
The problem with these moves is that the top 20% often see the writing on the wall and leave shortly after. Then the second 20% start testing the waters. Then...
It seems like a smart move to focus on the features that are most useful to their core users instead of trying to be everything to everybody.
Syncing. This is a default piece of all browsers, the 2 main operating systems win/os x, and comes standard on most phones. This is like the browser, you can have it for free so you stay in our ecosystem. Mega GIVES you 50GB of storage completely free NOW, and it is likely more secure. I don't know enterprise as well as I know consumer, but at some point I would imagine the choice is between buying a few SSDs and having an internal server, or setting up your own secure system via VPN. There can't be much room for this.
Maybe they are gearing up for a google merger or something. They are doing their mailbox app which looks cool and integrates storage and syncing. However, once again
1. Why would I use a mail client that only interfaces with gmail and outlook?
2. What is the point of the sync, this is default by most mail providers and clients?
3. Why would I want mail storage? I actually don't know what my mailbox limit is, but I certainly would not want to have the amount of .txt documents that could fill that up. Also, this is basic functionality. You can't pull me on your platform, google has the users you want and are better positioned, I still don't understand how you make money as a company.
Big fan of OneNote.
It seems like a fairly good product, although I really only use it for bookmarking tabs that Chrome seems to lose when it crashes/updates itself and nukes the "recently closed tabs" list.
Edit: Vs. Office Standard. I have no insight into Home or Education versions.
Architecturally it's a very impressive product and makes some pretty creative uses of the windows folder hierarchy to get it's job done.
I think OneNote was built with a crashfirst mentality - It is very hard to lose data w/ it. Their QA team is damn impressive too, I've been a follower of theirs for a while.
My only complaint is the lack of true real-time sharing ala google docs's Operational Transform (they didn't exist when it was made), but it does come close. Opening a shared notebook in class and having everyone collaborate on the note was an awesome experience.
It's inking support blows everything out of the water IMHO. It also has a lot of the advanced automation features you can access by integrating OneTastic.
Only real issue I've ran into is that it gets to be a pain to print with as it has some wonky scaling features and the page layout feels like an after thought.
It is also hard to get groups of people to use it effectively because it is basically a WIKI and needs to have the same kind of discipline / habits to make it usable.
If they can do inking support with Operational Transforms, they may be able to have a replay feature without even trying - something that many teachers seem to really want out of the product.
My friend and I love the product so much we've been trying to make our own online version with inking support w/ paper.js share.js, github, and localstorage.
However, although it's amazing compared to a pen and paper it's still incredibly frustrating to work with.
* It can't handle large amounts of handwriting without igniting relatively powerful computers
* It crashes constantly when trying to balance pen input with palm rejection
* Syncing doesn't really work with non-trivial merging and doesn't handle sync errors nor errors in general well -- all of these usually end up with handwriting layered on top of itself
* Syncing is basically out of your control, you can't do partial syncs when you really need a section/page fast, and large notebooks with handwriting can take hours to sync completely. I've basically resigned to splitting my notes into many smaller notebooks.
* Handwriting on the "Desktop" version is a complete joke and so you're constantly switching between the that and the app to get good handwriting and more features.
So it's great, until it doesn't work then it's a nightmare.
Managing notebooks, tabs and pages is a real pain. I end up with a sprawling OneNote notebook that gets lost in the sprawl of OneDrive/SharePoint.
(I haven't tried that many things, but really I don't know of any decent competitor that runs well on multiple platforms, and does the basic things I need - which is text notes, other file types, and ability to tag and put into a notebook. And on a native app).
This is a problem with too much funding. You have to pay off the investors, which requires rapid growth, which often requires buying market share at a loss.
Edit: the Business Insider article (which maybe should be retained as the link?) has some of the information: 13% of workforce let go. Taiwan, Singapore, and Moscow offices closing. I couldn't tell if the 47 were from these offices mostly. I wouldn't think a note-taking app/website would need to be too dispersed around the world.
even had the audacity to keep charging me
[0] https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2014/01/04/on-software-qualit...
That's a very, very bold statement...
At some point I installed Google Keep, which is lightweight, easy to use, and syncs, without feeling like I just installed an entire suite simply to jot down some quick notes.
Compare and contrast this with, say, craigslist, which still only has a few dozen employees. There's nothing wrong with keeping a product tightly scoped and keeping a business highly efficient and consistently profitable year after year, decade after decade. Maybe you don't get to ride the unicorn train, but maybe instead you get to work on something that you own (or own a big part of) and can enjoy your job consistently.
As a paying customer it's been very frustrating to see "business" features like note sharing and chat consuming valuable resources while the reason I bought the product, managing notes and todo lists, becomes increasing unusable.
Two months ago I pretty much decided 'ok you know what. This is it' after waiting for 25 seconds to get a note back that then turned out to be mysteriously 'missing'.
It happens, right. I get it. And I got it back with some support. But the focus wasn't there, and the platform got old.
Wind the clock back a year and a half (maybe two?) and Evernote was unstoppable compared to the competition.
Now? It's stale. Slow. Predictable and uninspiring.
While reading letters of layoffs is almost always a depressing thing, I sincerely hope that the 'focus' which they speak of is real. That everything, and I mean everything, gets dropped except making the core product as amazing as it once was.
If they do that, I'll come back in a heartbeat. I'll come back with dollar bills.
I got faith Evernote. Come back to the light.
http://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2015/08/16/1800#onenote-to-ru...