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Evernote is an example of a great product that is incompatible with the VC model of funding (also see Twitter). Once you take VC it's not acceptable to be a ni
by dasil003 8y ago
Evernote is an example of a great product that is incompatible with the VC model of funding (also see Twitter). Once you take VC it's not acceptable to be a niche product that does one thing really well, you have to worship at the altar of cancerous growth. The VCs would rather the product be ruined than miss an opportunity for 100-1000x, and if you don't agree they will install adult supervision to do their bidding.
- pishpash 8y agoWhat can Evernote do that can't be done by OneNote? If anything, free OneNote (or some other equivalent) killed it. I don't see what is special about Evernote that guarantees its viability.
- dasil003 8y agoEvernote killed itself by losing its vision in search of ever greater monetization, how the current product compares to other products on the landscape is irrelevant.
- threeseed 8y agoOneNote killed it. Apple Notes killed it. Both are free. Both do about 90% of what Evernote Basic does.
- cpburns2009 8y agoOneNote is free? I thought you had to pay for it as part of Microsoft Office Student edition.
- berbec 8y agoJust did a fresh install of windows 10. Onenote was pre-installed. When I installed office 365 premium, I got a second Onenote.
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoThe free version of OneNote is lighter. The version that comes with Office is full-featured. (Don't know exactly what's different, I've only used the office version.)
- oerpli 8y agoThe full version is also free. It comes included with the Office365 installer, but can be downloaded on its own: https://www.onenote.com/download https://www.onenote.com/download OneNote syncs to OneDrive - so if you have O365 your storage space is quite large, whereas free users only have 5GB (though compared to Evernote's 25MB this is still plenty)
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoUnless they've changed it quite recently, the version that comes with Office365 and the one from https://www.onenote.com/download https://www.onenote.com/download are different programs.
- MikusR 8y agoThe version that comes with Office is discontinued.
- berbec 8y agoI did an office 365 install a week ago and recall a second Onenote popping up. Is it just no longer being developed, or did I get one of the last installs? I was unaware of the change!
- downrightmike 8y agoFree on apple's appstore too.
- ajmurmann 8y agoDoes Apple notes have a web clipper out even allow for attachments?
- cknoxrun 8y agoAttachments, yes. Web clipper, no I don't think so. But I doubt most people who used to use Evernote and now use Apple notes ever used the web clipper (including me).
- prepend 8y agoI save web site as pdf and attach it to notes files when necessary. Whenever possible, I just try to name the file with tags to find through search.
- cpburns2009 8y agoI don't know what Evernote supports, but OneNote lacks some simple features. Can Evernote import slides from a PowerPoint larger than 50 MB? Because OneNote lost that. Does Evernote actually support saving to a file? Because OneNote doesn't support that trivial feature either.
- mathattack 8y agoCan OneNote copy and paste to Outlook without losing formatting?
- tjohns 8y agoThey each have their specialty. Evernote is better for filing documents / archiving things - whether those are PDFs, web pages, business cards, physical mail, etc. OneNote is better for free-form notetaking and editing. Each page feels like an open canvas. In particular: I can't drop a file directly onto the OneNote icon to archive a file - I have to make a "page" and drop it into the page's canvas. OneNote doesn't provide tagging. It enforces a certain organization that only makes sense for notes (notebooks > sections > pages). Attachments always feel like a second-class citizen inside of a page (which isn't to say OneNote's attachment handling is wrong, it's just designed for storing handouts in class alongside your handwriting, as opposed to archiving every piece of paper on your desk). In my use case, I use Evernote (with a ScanSnap scanner) to archive every piece of physical mail I receive. It's great that I can just throw in a pile of mail, push one button, let the scanner bundle it into PDFs/JPEGs/contact cards as appropriate, apply metatadata, and OCR/index it. I tried to move this workflow to OneNote, and couldn't get anything as smooth. I use both. I use OneNote for notes in class, and Evernote for long-term archival/recall of everything else. (Personally, I think that DevonThink is a closer replacement to Evernote than OneNote is.)
- zwayhowder 8y agoI spent years with the same workflow, and Evernote groaned to a halt with over 5000 PDFs in it for me. (i7, 16gb ram). I now store all my scans in Google Drive and use the OCR that comes with the ScanSnap. It works just as well, the search is Google fast and I can share them easily.
- brantonb 8y agoMy boss today wondered why he made a particular decision for a commit he made 3 years ago. He pulled up Evernote, searched for the bug number, and had his notes from when he was working on it. Mystery solved. With OneNote, he’d have to have some sort of filing system to organize that. With Evernote, he knew it was there and he could search for it if he needed it. That’s not to say you can’t search in OneNote, just that the archiving model of Evernote works far better for his workflow.
- Spooky23 8y agoOneNote doesn’t scale well once you start using it. Lots of people use it for a few weeks.
- opportune 8y agoWhat do you mean? I have seen medium-sized wikis written using OneNote, and I've seen it used as a collaboration environment for specifications / mockups / design in groups of dozens of people as well.
- johntash 8y agoThe one feature I never found a decent replacement for was Evernote's web clipper. It worked really well, and I actually used it quite a bit since it was so low effort compared to saving a page or copy/pasting something that I might want to refer to later.
- unstuckdev 8y agoWhat's missing in OneNote's web clipper?
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoThe Mac version of OneNote is missing quite a few features from the Windows version. Evernote doesn't have that problem. (I use OneNote anyway, since it's so much better then Evernote for me, it's just kind of annoying given that I switch between Mac and Windows a lot.) Also, the free (non-Office) version of OneNote is missing some features, I think.
- pishpash 8y agoMac Office is always missing things, it might as well be a different product. The free OneNote though should be the same and there is even a web-based version.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago> Mac Office is always missing things, it might as well be a different product. Is it? I've been using Excel cross-platform for a while and I haven't found a missing feature yet. (Although some keyboard shortcuts are annoyingly altered.) I don't use the rest of the Office suite as much, but OneNote is the only outlier I've seen personally.
- pishpash 8y agoOutlook is another example. Word/Excel are more complete but VBA and plugins may still differ.
- stef25 8y agoWhile kicking the tyres of OneNote I had an issue where it wouldn't paste all the text I copied, I think because there was a link in it. For some reason only MS seems to create products that fall flat on their face so quickly.
- sushid 8y agoWhat's wrong with Twitter? It's clearly paid off for the VCs, has grown, and is profitable. It didn't become the next Google or the rightful FB competitor (like analysts predicted) but it's doing well in its own right. Evernote is spinning around the drain and early employees and VCs alike are trying hard to dump their shares on the secondary market.
- mevile 8y ago> but it's doing well in its own right. I don't think anyone thinks Twitter is doing well in its own right. It's shedding users, it's possibly harming democracy, their moderation is being questioned daily in the national US press and many users don't know how to use Twitter.
- killerdhmo 8y agoFacebook and Google are just as complicit, if not more so, in this "harming democracy" and moderation questioning.
- mevile 8y agoThat may be true and I never made any assertion to say they weren't.
- bduerst 8y agoI understand Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, but how is Google being more complicit?
- 8bitchemistry 8y agoPerhaps via youtube's search and recommendation algorithms optimising for misinformation as an engagement strategy?
- bduerst 8y agoIs there proof that they are?
- yuhong 8y agoThe fun thing is that the Google and Larry/Sergey case turned to be more complex than this. I mentioned Ruth Porat in the most recent overview.
- pbreit 8y agoI would describe Twitter and Evernote as the opposite of "niche".
- hn_throwaway_99 8y agoIt's definitely niche in the world of VC. Take Twitter. The hope was that they would be the new Facebook, which basically everyone uses. While Twitter may have a lot of users, they aren't growing, and it's pretty clear there are basically two groups: Twitter users and non-Twitter users, and non-Twitter users don't see much reason to use it. But in the hopes of getting everyone to love Twitter, a lot of people think they lost focus on their existing users, which didn't make their existing users happy but never ended up enticing significant numbers of non-Twitter users either (FWIW I am in the "non-Twitter user camp", so not complaining they broke my experience)
- justin_vanw 8y agoI don't think it is a problem with the VC model at all. Evernote has taken more than $300MM in funding. Nobody put a gun to their head and made them take that money. The people who run Evernote decided to go in and tell investors that they had a plan to turn Evernote into a multi billion dollar company, and that plan said they needed a huge pile of money, and the investors made the mistake of writing a check. Evernote could have skipped those VC meetings, skipped renting the huge, insanely expensive office just off Rt. 1 by SF, skipped putting huge, expensive light up Evernote signs on that office, and skipped hiring hundreds of engineers in the most expensive place in the world to hire engineers. They could have rented a small office in a commercial park in San Jose and only hired 10 people and now they would be quite profitable. They could have done this by only taking a few million dollars in funding, and now they wouldn't need an insane valuation to exit.
- mayank 8y ago101, not rt 1. They’ve had a massive sign on a building on 101 that always struck me as a zeitgeist for SV — a note taking app with its logo on a building...
- rcxdude 8y agoThis feels like the same thing as the other poster said. The problem is not so much that the VC model exists, so much as the leaders of Evernote decided to pursue it (and perhaps to some degree the culture in silicon valley which pushes founders towards this model).
- megaman8 8y agoI seem to see this happen quite frequently, it should be a meme.
- dominicr 8y agoI agree, it's the widespread VC culture of big growth & big exits that gets people talking about Evernote as dead or dying, when in reality if it was a small company focused on it's core product and building steadily then it'd be considered a success. For a company success should be making a profit, treating your employees well and making something worthwhile.