4 ms·

Evernote failed because their product was sub-par. Onenote always provided better organization, better pen input. There were just numerous places in which you c

by gaze 7y ago

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

ghaff 7y ago
Mentioning OneNote sort of makes another point as well. I expect a lot of Office users have never heard of OneNote. The whole general category that lets people save notes of pieces of the Web for later use just turned out to be not that big a thing for most people. I should be a target for this sort of software and used something else in the same general vein for a few years. But I don't really like everything tied up in a proprietary format even if I can export bits and pieces to some degree. And more generally just tend to go back to text editors, word processing docs, etc. Put another way, it's software that sort of demands 1.) That you want to carefully save/curate what you read and write for later reuse and 2.) You go all in on a particular program.
- gaze 7y ago
  I, like many others, use OneNote for science and engineering purposes. I use it to keep hand-written notes from seminars, calculations, discussions with collaborators, as well as keeping track of every every wafer I've fabricated on. I take my tablet into the cleanroom with me. When I'm repairing a piece of equipment, I take pictures and paste them in my notebook and draw on them where I think a failure has occurred. My daily experimental workflow involves making a new sheet per day, logging my changes to my experimental setup, and pasting matplotlib plots into it. My life as a scientist revolves around onenote. If you go to a conference, you'll see numerous people with their surface pro or surface laptop, surface pen, and a copy of onenote open. Evernote missed the opportunity to make a real tool. They kinda almost did. They sorta grazed by making a real tool. Enough so that I sunk more time than I wish I had into trying to make their software work for me before throwing my hands up and realizing they're completely unserious about what they're making.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    The tool I used for a time was fairly explicitly aimed at researchers as I recall. Though TBF that's probably a pretty niche area. (See also Scrivener on the Mac which targets screenwriting and book writers. It's been around for ages so I assume it's making someone a bit of money but, I also assume, very much in the lifestyle business level of revenue.)
    - egypturnash 7y ago
      I wanna say Scrivener exists - or at least it did in the first place - because it was a "scratch your own itch" kind of project. New versions are pretty rare, it's twelve years old and only on version 3. Checking their 'about us' page (https://www.literatureandlatte.com/about-us https://www.literatureandlatte.com/about-us) confirms that; the founder learn to program explicitly to make the There's a total of twelve people listed on that about page, only three of whom are programmers. Most of them are also writers, including two of the programmers, and it sort of sounds like a lot of these jobs are part-time. So yeah, definitely lifestyle business rather than unicorn.
synlatexc 7y ago
> There were just numerous places in which you could see that man-hours were being placed in the wrong places. I once read an interview with the founder of Genius, and something he said stuck with me: “I guarantee that 90% of you are working on the wrong things, and you think you’re working hard, but you might as well not be going to work at all." Spot-on.

by gaze 7y ago

ghaff 7y ago

Mentioning OneNote sort of makes another point as well. I expect a lot of Office users have never heard of OneNote. The whole general category that lets people save notes of pieces of the Web for later use just turned out to be not that big a thing for most people. I should be a target for this sort of software and used something else in the same general vein for a few years. But I don't really like everything tied up in a proprietary format even if I can export bits and pieces to some degree. And more generally just tend to go back to text editors, word processing docs, etc. Put another way, it's software that sort of demands 1.) That you want to carefully save/curate what you read and write for later reuse and 2.) You go all in on a particular program.

gaze 7y ago
I, like many others, use OneNote for science and engineering purposes. I use it to keep hand-written notes from seminars, calculations, discussions with collaborators, as well as keeping track of every every wafer I've fabricated on. I take my tablet into the cleanroom with me. When I'm repairing a piece of equipment, I take pictures and paste them in my notebook and draw on them where I think a failure has occurred. My daily experimental workflow involves making a new sheet per day, logging my changes to my experimental setup, and pasting matplotlib plots into it. My life as a scientist revolves around onenote. If you go to a conference, you'll see numerous people with their surface pro or surface laptop, surface pen, and a copy of onenote open. Evernote missed the opportunity to make a real tool. They kinda almost did. They sorta grazed by making a real tool. Enough so that I sunk more time than I wish I had into trying to make their software work for me before throwing my hands up and realizing they're completely unserious about what they're making.
- ghaff 7y ago
  The tool I used for a time was fairly explicitly aimed at researchers as I recall. Though TBF that's probably a pretty niche area. (See also Scrivener on the Mac which targets screenwriting and book writers. It's been around for ages so I assume it's making someone a bit of money but, I also assume, very much in the lifestyle business level of revenue.)
  - egypturnash 7y ago
    I wanna say Scrivener exists - or at least it did in the first place - because it was a "scratch your own itch" kind of project. New versions are pretty rare, it's twelve years old and only on version 3. Checking their 'about us' page (https://www.literatureandlatte.com/about-us https://www.literatureandlatte.com/about-us) confirms that; the founder learn to program explicitly to make the There's a total of twelve people listed on that about page, only three of whom are programmers. Most of them are also writers, including two of the programmers, and it sort of sounds like a lot of these jobs are part-time. So yeah, definitely lifestyle business rather than unicorn.

synlatexc 7y ago

> There were just numerous places in which you could see that man-hours were being placed in the wrong places. I once read an interview with the founder of Genius, and something he said stuck with me: “I guarantee that 90% of you are working on the wrong things, and you think you’re working hard, but you might as well not be going to work at all." Spot-on.