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Evernote and "The Wall Street Journal"
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Posted by 22111
Nov 30, 2014 at 03:30 AM
You guys had a discussion here, about 1 year ago, that EN had now been positioned as a “lifestyle product”, but in the meantime, you seem to have forgotten about this already again.
Fact is, thingies like Facebook, What’sApp, Evernote et al. are money-generating machines for their inventors, or as the Grimm tale is, Gold-Ayyes (sorry for the spelling error, but even for classics, some words are forbidden now (well, it’s AFTER 1984, so what do you expect?)): That’s their reasons of being.
Just today, welt.de says, only one-third of 13-years-olds are on Facebook anymore, but just one sentence later, they tell us that these kids are now on WA instead: Well, the good news is, WA belongs to Mr. Futterberg (or what was his name again?), too, now!
Ok, not all of them are as successful as Mr. Futterberg is with his “give me your data. all of them.” imperium, but at least they strive, and EN is one of the premier efforts in this trend.
Thus, whining about EN not being a traditional PIM anymore is obsolete, and just a little bit whimsical for grown-ups.
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Nov 30, 2014 at 04:32 AM
Discussion started this time around because of super incompetent dumming down of Evernote browser app which makes it virtually unusable.
That caused me concern about whether I should continue to trust EN as a basic container of some 10,000 articles because if the powers that be at EN did the same to the desktop and/or Android product I’d be in a mess.
So I raised question of alternatives.
Yes there was a discussion about EN positioning a year ago, and probably every year before that. But it was changes since then which prompted the current discussion.
And in the process some of us found out just how much service and support, as well as quality, has dropped at EN since that dicussion. New information Fred.
Not surprising, though, old themes came up again - but perhaps with more focus. EN positioning as a business product with cross merchandising with the likes of Moleskine (an overpriced product backed up by fictional provenance linking it to Hemingway) vs the kind of info needs writers and academics might have. I guess lifestyle factored in there someplace.
But more important was notion that Phil Libin and crew have serious issues, lease of which is one of focus. Info dump & limited info manager for business? A vehicle for profitable cross promotions and merchandising? A software for the needs of writers and scholars which, while without necessarily being a bib manager, are different from those of business.
I made my annual and predictable comment that Libin et al have always had issues understanding what an info manager does.
And I added that one reason EN does as well as it does is because of business consultant types (I refuse to dignify them with the word guru which out of the Sanskrit has some substantive meaning) who write EN manuals much of which consist of work-arounds for a product lacking in information features.
Interestingly none of this discussion on this forum, or my tweets about the issue on Twitter have elicited a response from Libin or anyone else. This is unusual. I have found Libin and EN service to be regular monitors and responders on Twitter prior to this last go-around.
I have also visited the EN forums. There has been a sea change in the last year. Even some of the usual fanboyz over there are opening critically of EN developers and service/support.
In the process of all this, a worthwhile discussion ensued with Neville Franks of Surfulater/Clibu - and a robust discussion as to where Clibu is at in its development and some of Neville’s next steps.
As for me, having lost confidence in EN I am trying to figure out what to do. Am using Workflowy for some stuff, and find Nimbus Note a much more professional, thoughtful - though far from perfect in its still early iterations - product than Evernote. And it even has elements of aesthetic appeal, which EN lost long ago, especially as it barged thoughtlessly into the bizarre world of mobile app and Windows 8 design.
I am looking with some interest at Zotero.
Anyhow, that’s the background of the current discussion - it’s not simply that we’re all addicted to having annual disingenuous discussion about whether EN is a lifestyle product or a breath mint (reference to tag line in old Certs commercial - Certs is a candy mint - Certs is a breath mint - Certs is both; cute at the time, I guess).
Cheers,
Daly
22111 wrote:
You guys had a discussion here, about 1 year ago, that EN had now been
>positioned as a “lifestyle product”, but in the meantime, you seem to
>have forgotten about this already again.
>
>Fact is, thingies like Facebook, What’sApp, Evernote et al. are
>money-generating machines for their inventors, or as the Grimm tale is,
>Gold-Ayyes (sorry for the spelling error, but even for classics, some
>words are forbidden now (well, it’s AFTER 1984, so what do you
>expect?)): That’s their reasons of being.
>
>Just today, welt.de says, only one-third of 13-years-olds are on
>Facebook anymore, but just one sentence later, they tell us that these
>kids are now on WA instead: Well, the good news is, WA belongs to Mr.
>Futterberg (or what was his name again?), too, now!
>
>Ok, not all of them are as successful as Mr. Futterberg is with his
>“give me your data. all of them.” imperium, but at least they strive,
>and EN is one of the premier efforts in this trend.
>
>Thus, whining about EN not being a traditional PIM anymore is obsolete,
>and just a little bit whimsical for grown-ups.
Posted by Paul Korm
Nov 30, 2014 at 07:13 PM
I don’t have particular concerns about what Evernote is (“lifestyle” or whatever)—that’s a timewaster.
IMO, what’s always important to mull over and discuss here and elsewhere is “what happens next”. By this I mean I believe it is important to always have an exit plan from any cloud. I tolerate Evernote because the desktop client is still pretty good (despite v6 glitches) and its easy to unplug it from the Evernote cloud and have my data safe and triple-backed-up here in my local network and my private offsite. I don’t get this from Workflowy and its peers and would thus never use it.
My rule of thumb is: if I can unplug from a cloud service and still have my data, then I’ll tolerate the cloud service otherwise I won’t touch it for anything more than curiosity. I can unplug Dropbox, OneDrive and the like so I’m good with that. I can’t unplug Trello, and its peers, so they’re dead to me.
(Products mentioned here just for illustration.)
Posted by Chris Murtland
Nov 30, 2014 at 10:26 PM
Paul Korm wrote:
>its
>easy to unplug it from the Evernote cloud and have my data safe and
>triple-backed-up here in my local network and my private offsite. I
>don’t get this from Workflowy and its peers and would thus never use it.
Here are all the places my Workflowy data lives - automatically:
1. workflowy.com
2. text file in Dropbox
3. local text file on my machine’s Dropbox folder
4. copy of the local text file on my local network storage
5. Gmail (using the daily email option, which includes everything that changed the previous day)
6. Evernote.com server (email auto-forwarded from Gmail)
7. local Evernote client
This excludes the option to manually export the entire Workflowy outline to formatted text, plain text or OPML at any moment.
Granted, I think you have to be a paid user to achieve some of the above. But I don’t feel worried with this setup that I am going to lose any of my data even if Workflowy folds.
Posted by Franz Grieser
Nov 30, 2014 at 10:46 PM
Paul.
That’s exactly why I have been using Evernote. And exactly why I think about dropping Evernote: Last week, I went to a seminar in the mountains - no internet there. So I took along my iPad with a huge Evernote database - I had synced before leaving, and I have a Premium account. When I was in the mountains, EN wouldn’t open any of my notes. Always the same error message: Switch offline operation on, or else you cannot access this note. But this message also appeared after I switched offline operation on (and off and on). And it appeared also when trying to open notes I had been able to open on the iPad without internet connection before.
So, my trust in EN dramatically dropped.
:-(
Paul Korm wrote:
>I don’t have particular concerns about what Evernote is (“lifestyle” or
>whatever)—that’s a timewaster.
>
>IMO, what’s always important to mull over and discuss here and elsewhere
>is “what happens next”. By this I mean I believe it is important to
>always have an exit plan from any cloud. I tolerate Evernote because
>the desktop client is still pretty good (despite v6 glitches) and its
>easy to unplug it from the Evernote cloud and have my data safe and
>triple-backed-up here in my local network and my private offsite. I
>don’t get this from Workflowy and its peers and would thus never use it.
>
>
>My rule of thumb is: if I can unplug from a cloud service and still have
>my data, then I’ll tolerate the cloud service otherwise I won’t touch it
>for anything more than curiosity. I can unplug Dropbox, OneDrive and
>the like so I’m good with that. I can’t unplug Trello, and its peers,
>so they’re dead to me.
>
>(Products mentioned here just for illustration.)