They don’t need to be jealous. Their relative utilitarian take on the matter is what makes them so unique and powerful in the market.
Yes, I love markdown, and Evernote just provides a slightly more powerful, WYSIWYG version of it. I neither want “everything and the kitchen sink” vision of Notion, and desktop centric view of Obsidian.
Ulysses and Bear are Apple first systems, and while I use Apple mobile devices, my ecosystem is much more varied, and Evernote accommodates all, with feature parity.
They are good and understated. Hope that I won’t need to move out after that acquisition.
Man this was not my experience at all. Granted I dropped Evernote quite a while ago, but for years they kept adding a kitchen sink of features that I didn't care about, while regressing at the basics like syncing and merging text notes across multiple devices.
They were maybe first company I experienced that blew up a really solid app I liked after raising a truck load of VC money and trying to take over the world.
Not everything is meant to be a multi-billion dollar business and that’s ok!
I would get notes that would not sync correctly, forcing me to resolve it by hand. Even after doing that, it would still have sync conflicts. This was core functionality that just didn't work.
During this time, they were busy jamming in features I definitely didn't want or need. Every release would be a slower, buggier version of its previous incarnation.
It was during this time frame that a lot of people jumped ship. The app was so bloated and buggy by that point that even OneNote seemed like a viable option.
It didn't help that Evernote made it as difficult as possible to get your notes out of their system. It took several download attempts to successfully get my archive out of there. It might have also been due to the large number of people leaving their platform.
The handwriting was on the wall when they started selling knick-knacks on their website. Things like Evernote branded Moleskine notepads and dress socks. It's like they completely abandoned their core competency and went off in some left-field marketing direction.
It's a real shame, too, because Evernote was an amazing app when it first came out.
I'm giving org-mode a spin these days on my desktop. Need to figure out if there's a way to sync/view it on my Android device, but I'm getting kind of tired of dealing with all the different, proprietary SaaS note taking services that go to shit after a few years. At least with Emacs and org-mode, that's one less thing to deal with.
They had a relatively good product around v5X series and I left because they just started to fragment and add more and more non-notetaking related things at the expense of the entire product stability and core functionality.
Similarly, I miss their presentation mode for the notes. It was extremely useful, and the output was very pretty, too.
However, after the CEO change and rebuild, they really found themselves. I’m a pro subscriber, and the value they add into my life is immeasurable.
I would prefer to pay for my storage (or host my own) and have apps use my cloud backend. Every app running cloud server to sync all sorts of things has become too much for me.
I still rock 1Password 7 and use iCloud sync. I’d pay for the app but it’s free. I pay for iCloud storage.
Anyway I might give there new apps a look.
People say "Installing your own servers is cool, why don't you do that?". I do that, but for small things. At work, I have a fleet of servers, and managing them is enough. After being able to play with cutting edge stuff, renting a VPS from DO and putting stuff on top of it is neither fun, nor satisfying.
Instead, I diligently select and use services, and offload maintenance of such systems to the provider. Of course I take my backups and take my precautions, but I don't want to manage every service I use.
I personally don't like subscription services mostly, but some subscriptions provide real services which I see worthy, and I happily pay for them. Evernote is one of them.
Personally, I started using Evernote seriously only a month ago after several years, and recently trying pretty much everything else (notion, obsidian, joplin, workflowy and 10s more..). So I don't have any of the baggage from whatever mistakes they made years ago.
It's been awesome. Very wide featureset like more than just markdown, web clipping, auto scanning & OCR, sketching support on iPad, tags and fully cross platform. I found every other application to fall short somewhere and just be too opinionated. Evernote is solid and powerful enough to support almost every usecase I have but not opinionated.
Since many of the people who despised of Evernote never tried their new apps, and doesn't know what changed and how it works now.
It's still not perfect, and based on Electron, yet it's leaps and bounds better when compared to yesteryear, and it really works well for my case.
I think we need to see where it's going to go. As I said elsewhere, I don't want to abandon them when thinking how I use them, and hope that they don't do some drastic changes.
I'm considering as this hasn't happened, until the new changes start to rollout.
I think you can add Craft to that list.
Too bad, they all look nice, but I've completely left the Apple ecosystem.
If they don't have Android and Linux desktop apps, they don't really compete for the same market
And having this view is OK and valid. On the other hand, I tend to use Evernote a lot on my mobile device, mostly in read-only mode.
I keep a lot of technical documents and cheat sheets I've written and sometimes need them while only having my mobile device with me, and it saves a lot of time.
I also scan hand-written notes for later digitizing them, and Evernote OCRs them at the background, saving me time in the process.
It's definitely a horses for courses issue, and if Obsidian works for you, go ahead, use it with its full potential.
Hopefully recent economic events will change the culture and more companies will actually factor in reality into their growth models.
How would it, and how would they?
The way I understand it, the growth model is pretty ultimately set in stone when a company takes VC money. It's a Faustian bargain - you get a big and cheap loan, at the price of aiming for "some fantasy growth", or dying in the attempt. Companies that want sustainable growth take loans from banks.
It's easy to get yourself as a founder into a situation where you're trading fundamentals for next-round narrative, and a lot of times that's that can be the deathknell.
The difference between those two values represents a gap that has to be closed before you're on steady ground, and the gap widens at a higher-than-normal rate because of the growth expectations of the VC money.
Anyway, that's what it looks like to this complete outsider. Companies full of very capable people, pushed to do desperate things, and to do those things quickly. And, like the churn of leveraged Wall Street finance, there are plenty of people who live for the froth of it all.
Such people are a dead weight on our society, sucking at education funds, not weighing the cost they have, and giving lessons to everyone.
Those guys will never understand how to provide a service that customers are willing to pay for.
One point of anecdata: I haven't heard of any of those.
How do you define success?
Keep in mind Evernote was created in 2000 and the web version was launched in 2008.
I doubt any of the stuff in your list will be around in 14 years.
Maybe Roam, Obsidian, Logseq would be better examples of booming apps note-takers jump ship to? But then, I think all of these apps are rather niche compared to Evernote.
Trello's acquisition was not as disastrous as I thought yet, for example. Wunderlist became Microsoft To Do. As a result, they are burrowed deep into the Microsoft ecosystem and got forgotten on the other hand.
Let's see where it goes and what's gonna happen to the ecosystem. I like Evernote at its current state, hope they won't turn it upside down.
I care far less about the feature set than I do getting the whatever written down and out of my head.
If you make we wait while you load a website's worth of js or phone home with surveillance data or whatever, I'm just going to delete you. I'd rather use a 1995-era Textedit or Notepad - they're instantly functional.
Just to make sure I maintain my curmudgeon's rep, I'll add - advertise AI and I'm also gone. I have zero need for assistance from a tripping robot to type in my work life.
https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/360052560314-Ins...
Evernote has ran my brain for 12 years but I can’t cope with new Electron app - no tabs?!
If you cancel an account that didn't pay them any money, what exactly did they lose?
I pay for todoist because I love using it and the free account doesn't have a must-have feature (reminders). I could dump them and find something else, but I get plenty of value for the money I spend with them.
That's true for normal companies. Startups operate by a different set of rules.
> If you cancel an account that didn't pay them any money, what exactly did they lose?
A user, and a potential source of future users.
For many startups, userbase growth matters much more than revenue, to the point they'll happily go negative on per-user profitability just to get more people on-board. Particularly those that aggressively pursue further funding ("actually making us profitable is something we'll consider after the next round") or an exit ("it'll be a problem for the sucker that buys us").
Yes, it is a source of a lot of pathology you see with today's software products, like products getting bloated with irrelevant pseudo-features ("oh shit, we can't actually make this sustainable; quick, let's try to extract all value we can from the userbase, and hopefully have something left after paying off the investors"), or getting acquired and shut down ("ha ha, we knew it was never going to be sustainable; we bought it to cheaply acquire talent and/or get you out of the way so you don't compete with our offering").
In every case, VCs and founders win, users lose.
Yup they did. Blew it when they didn't add 2FA. I emailed them repeatedly in the early years asking for them to add it citing risks of having all my information in a note taking application with poor security -> no replies. Then they got p0wned hard. Luckily I had my data out of their systems by then.
See screenshot of emails at https://twitter.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/15930599365060894...
Thank God I happened to have my most important note open on my laptop, which was closed at the time. I opened it, shut down the wifi as quick as I could so it couldn't update, and copied that note into OneNote, which frankly works better anyway. I will never trust Evernote again.
> Same deal with Notion. They raised a $343M Series C on Oct 8, 2021 at $10 billion in valuation.
>These are all crazy numbers from a crazy time, and now the economic hangover is due.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-bubble-has-popped-for-unprofit...
I think we need to fast forward 10 more years to see how Notion is doing to make the comparison.
I dumped Evernote when they restricted their free accounts to 2 devices. Ironically I'm now paying for Ulysses, money I might have give to Evernote had they not been so awful to early adopters.