Forum Posts Feed
Evernote 5 is here
< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Oct 11, 2013 at 02:25 PM
Phil Libin’s story is interesting. He was losing his shirt on EN, and only an 11th hour investor saved the day, keeping the product alive.
I have a lot of respect for what has been accomplished in terms of software engineering and marketing. No doubt it is a profitable result. And still, the premium version is relatively inexpensive for what is on offer, compared with many new productivity related subscription type programs which charge much for relatively less.
The Trunk may be EN’s way of recognizing its limitations as an information manager. It’s ingenious and some of The Trunk programs are nifty.
If I was Libin, I’d begin to take seriously what all of us info and outliner wonks have been saying for years. An infocentric version of EN could be offered for say, a dollar more per month than the regular premium. I suspect the additional revenue would make it worthwhile.
Ariadne had a lot of potential to develop into a heavier duty info manager. Unfortunately, the latest version shows that the ingenuity of its earlier incarnations has been lost. 4.0 versions of Ariadne may be among the best note taking apps on the market for those who want something more than bare bones.
Yesterday I spent several hours working with WhizFolders, relieved at having resolved my anxiety around EN and always having to set it up to do what it should have in the first place. I accomplished a fair bit, and for the first time in months felt like I might be a real writer if I wasn’t careful. :-)
Daly
But I doubt that will happen. Other programs will fill the void.
Daly
Hugh wrote:
>
>WSP wrote:
>
>>
>>Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>>
>>I am quite certain that
>>>neither Phil Libin, the Evernote CEO, nor any of his top bras have
>>>thought about this use—at least not seriously considered it.
>>
>>I have long since resigned myself, more or less cheerfully, to the fact
>>that I am really not Libin’s target demographic. (Nor, I suspect, is
>>anyone else on this forum.) When Libin and his top brass in 2008 began
>>to blather on about taking pictures of wine labels and expressed open
>>contempt for power-users, I became very upset and abandoned the program
>>for a number of years; and I notice more recently that he now routinely
>>denies that Evernote is even a note-taking program. Oh well. It’s a
>fine
>>program, and it obviously can be used for information-gathering (in
>>other words, note-taking) on a large scale. Nowadays I don’t
>>particularly mind if Libin seems to be obsessed with the lifestyle
>crowd
>>—as long as he doesn’t remove any of EN’s functionality while he
>tries
>>to gather in a zillion more users. Meanwhile, some of us will find ways
>>to use Evernote that he has never thought about. I confess I’m rather
>>pleased to be doing that. It’s my subtle form of revenge against the
>>wine-label obsessives.
>>
>>Bill
>>
>
>I must admit I too have had vengeful thoughts - against those who
>transformed the original ‘tear-off-and-use’ Evernote, which I found
>pretty useful, into something that I find less useful. But the fact that
>the market hasn’t replaced the original like-for-like is perhaps an
>indication that I’m in a very small minority. And I suppose one must
>admire the boldness of those who conceived the current Evernote, its
>platform independence and its free/premium business model - I think they
>were amongst the first on a large scale - and who went out and raised a
>relatively large sum of money for a small-ish developer - $6m initially?
>- to bring their conception to reality.
Posted by Garland Coulson
Oct 11, 2013 at 09:54 PM
I am a lover of outline software and a very happy user of Evernote but Evernote is NOT an outliner. There is no hierarchical structure and Evernote actively discourages organizing this way. Even people that try to use tags in a hierarchical way are just doing work arounds - the tags aren’t really in hierarchies.
Instead, all the data is dumped into various notebooks and then retrieved via tag search. Some people even use only ONE notebook to hold everything.
At first, I resisted this and kept thinking I needed more structure, but I have become a believer over time. I can now find things faster with smart use of tags than I can by drilling down through a hierarchical structure. And, best of all, with tagging a note can be found with every possible use for it instead of only being in one place in a rigid structure.
For what I use Evernote for, it is fantastic and I don’t miss the lack of structure. But there are some things that an outliner works better for and then I use other products.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Oct 12, 2013 at 05:06 AM
Garland Coulson wrote:
>At first, I resisted this and kept thinking I needed more structure, but
>I have become a believer over time.
Yes, at the end of the day, everything might be miscellaneous http://www.everythingismiscellaneous.com/
To summarise my own attitude in respect to the above view of things, I will quote from the story of an (apparently) unrelated discipline: “I know it’s true, but I just don’t believe it”.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Oct 12, 2013 at 06:01 AM
dan7000 wrote:
>While it’s true that corporations have
>traditionally used file folders for documents, that is only because
>legacy operating systems, originally built for personal computers with
>floppy discs, used folders. Corporations have largely realized this
>doesn’t work for large collections of documents in the enterprise, which
>is why we now have “Enterprise Document Management” or “Enterprise
>Content Management,” which use relational databases, not hierarchies.
>I’ve used a number of these EDM-type systems in my work, involving
>collections of hundreds of thousands or millions of documents. These
>systems usually have lots of different views on your data, some of which
>involve very shallow hierarchies - like a tree of saved searches, a tree
>of tags, and a single-level tree of “binders” or “folders”. EN is
>probably the most convenient version of this for personal use, but there
>will be a lot better tools in the future, based on these EDM systems.
Dan, can you mention some EDM systems that you believe eventually might be scaled-down and re-packaged for small business or even personal use? Are you talking about the likes of Alfresco and Liferay, or something like Sharepoint?
My view does not necessarily contradict yours, but I personally see ICT developments in recent decades having been led by the consumer market, even if the original technologies were developed for the high-end markets—including the military in the case of communications. In this context, I expect that the next widespread knowledge- or content-management system is more likely to be launched first as a personal / small team solution and then scaled up. It could be Evernote or Onenote for all I know—not to mention some cloud product currently being developed at a college dormitory.
Without having followed TheBrain story closely, I seem to recall that after version 1.5 they had withdrawn the Development Kit and the ability to publish brains in the personal versions, focusing on their EKP—Enterprise Knowledge Platform—offering instead. More recently, publishing has been brought back in the personal version, a Team version is being developed based on the personal, and Harlan Hugh—inventor of TheBrain and former CTO—is now CEO. It seems to me that they have shifted from a top-down to a bottom-up strategy.
Another example is Microsoft’s evolution of Office to the 365 version, as a full solution for businesses. Again, I see a bottom-up approach: take the products that most knowledge workers are already familiar with and scale them up / interconnect them to cover the needs of the business.
I’m the co-owner of a 7-person service oriented business. On the average working day, I receive more than 50 business related email messages. Not counting the replies, we are talking about more than 10,000 interrelated ‘documents’ a year, and I know that some of my collaborators receive a lot more. Add to these the attachments which take on a life of their own and you can realise that the needs of even an individual knowledge worker nowadays are (un)reasonably close to those of a corporation in the not-so-distant past. The market is here, now.
Posted by 22111
Oct 12, 2013 at 11:49 AM
As I said here recently, I’ve read that several big players currently follow a top-down strategy, and this is because they have the development money, but all the big corporations have got their stuff, when for little corporations, really sophisticated offerings are mostly lackings, and “there’s a market, here, now”, which up to now wasn’t of enough commercial interest to the big players.
Nobody should touch TheBrain, people loose data with it, and doing “strategy” without delivering the basics is a most ridiculous thing, and no serious buyer will get his data into such an unreliable data structure - of course, I’m speaking of the versions we get access, too, but their “corporate things” should be a myth: You need real data storage, and definitely, the personal version does not deliver that, so why should their corp version do?
Also, I cannot imagine any serious corporation to store their data (even if is was safe there) within such a “web” representation, where the user always looks at beautiful graphics, and then has to work with his mouse all the time - I know corporate people who work with a keyboard, and with multiple lists: They would like to know where the “location” of their respective data is, TB’s “flow” of things might apply to some marketing/advertizing people, on a mac.
Show me one serious corporation that uses TB (any version) in a general way, and my mouth will not shut up anymore for the rest of my life, but this will not happen - as you know, even formerly serious corporations are sometimes brought to pieces, by very special managers; in war, you call this acts of sabotage.
No, big players don’t need to be afraid of TB acting bottom-up: Read their “we are in so many big corps” as a “for 3 installations within the strategy department where it’s used as one tool among many others for the same purpose”.
As Daly says it (if I understood him well): With a sophisticated 2-pane outliner, he can do real work, he’s getting creative and productive, when in the flat EN world, he just gathers things (which is not so bad if you (can) do both.
Of course, with MS, it’s a little bit different, they try some things, with what they’ve got, and they are rather successful with it, for the opacity of the dms market, and also because they can offer better integration with the low-level things, at least in theory (and because the anti-youknow authorities don’t do their work: hidden interfaces, and so on). But as I see it, this hampers the sophistication of their offering, or in other wording: If you have a really integrated workflow, Word becomes less important for you.
And yes, I know excellent 7-, 70-, 700-people (not 7,000-people) dms, but its real value would not become evident to prospects who then try to compare with TB.