A long, interesting article about Evernote's decline:

http://www.smh.com.au/business/innovation/how-us1-billion-evernote-went-from-silicon-valley-darling-to-deep-trouble-20161006-grw7eg.html

Interesting! Of course, such a rapid reputational reversal and percentage-wise value decline in a start-up have happened before and will happen again. But perhaps not such changes in absolute terms.

One of my take-aways from this article is that it is stupid to trust the so-called experts who value these tech companies. A billion dollars? For what? A flawed note-taking app.

Steve Z.

Out of 150 million registered users "the number of paying users is currently in the 'millions,'" and "20,000 businesses use the company's business version of the product."

That doesn't sound like a lot of paying customers to me (they didn't say "tens of millions", so even at 9 million it would be like 6% conversion rate?), for a company that is supposed to be worth $1 billion.

The main thing is they could still afford "house cleaning services every two weeks to all employees." Not bad...

It does seem like they had the wrong priorities. It's weird they are still after an IPO instead of trying to get the product right, so people who've been registered for a decade (like me) would finally bite the bait and pay for premium packages.

10 overseas offices? For a notetaking app? And what have they done? Has Evernote really changed all that much since 2008, a time when a cloud-synced notetaking app was a really big deal?

Apparently they eventually added a "Related Notes" feature, something I'm happy to see in an app that isn't DevonThink, but that was added with minimal fanfare and considering how little I've heard about it (unlike with DevonThink where that's the main selling point), I'm left assuming it doesn't even work that well.Side rant: With how obsessed the tech industry currently is with AI and "deep learning," why is this feature so rare?

And now apparently the plan to save it is to try to get everyone to pay $90 per year? With all the recent news about Evernote, I'm left feeling like I'm buying a ticket for the Titanic.

shatteredmindofbob wrote:

10 overseas offices? For a notetaking app?

Yeah, that's definitely a strange one...

The link is now dead (404) and in a cursory search of the Herald site it seems the article is no longer there. Hmmm

When the article did exist, it claim that Evernote's revenue was $36 million annual. Seems low, but taking that as true -- it would mean the 150million users are paying on the average 24 cents/year. At that rate, those who buy the Premium subscription are in essence "subsidizing" around 300 users. Not a great model. If they are searching for a way to monetize the service, then get rid of all free accounts -- set the fee at $30 annual (for example) and lose 99% of existing users but break even. Looks like paying for house cleaning service and free meals didn't attract some economics 101 grads with common sense.

WSP wrote:

A long, interesting article about Evernote's decline:

http://www.smh.com.au/business/innovation/how-us1-billion-evernote-went-from-silicon-valley-darling-to-deep-trouble-20161006-grw7eg.html

Paul Korm wrote:

If they are searching for a way
to monetize the service, then get rid of all free accounts -- set the
fee at $30 annual (for example) and lose 99% of existing users but break
even. Looks like paying for house cleaning service and free meals
didn't attract some economics 101 grads with common sense.

>

That's exactly what I think they should do. Freemium makes sense for a new company trying to get people to try out the service, but not for one that's been around for a while.

Steve Z.

Wow, that was some seriously fast footwork by Evernote's lawyers. Clearly they can still afford them ;-)

Paul Korm wrote:

The link is now dead (404) and in a cursory search of the Herald site it
seems the article is no longer there. Hmmm

Try this link instead:

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/evernote-is-in-deep-trouble-2015-10

it looks like the article was originally from OCT 4, 2015.

MadaboutDana wrote:

Wow, that was some seriously fast footwork by Evernote's lawyers.
Clearly they can still afford them ;-)

It's more like the Herald realised that the article looked too similar to the Business Insider article from a year ago...

And at this link:

http://www.theherald.com.au/story/4211649/how-us1-billion-evernote-went-from-silicon-valley-darling-to-deep-trouble/?cs=9

Dr Andus wrote:

Try this link instead:
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/evernote-is-in-deep-trouble-2015-10

it looks like the article was originally from OCT 4, 2015.

No wonder I had a sense of de ja vu: we already had this discussion last year :-)

http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/6016/10

Well, and that was a very good discussion so it's certainly time well spent to have it again! LOL

Obviously none of us here remembered being there before.

Dr Andus wrote:

Dr Andus wrote:
>Try this link instead:
>http://www.businessinsider.com.au/evernote-is-in-deep-trouble-2015-10
>
>it looks like the article was originally from OCT 4, 2015.

No wonder I had a sense of de ja vu: we already had this discussion last
year :-)

http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/6016/10

Actually, there have been several significant developments in Evernote during the past year:

It has new leadership.

It has changed its pricing. When this was announced on the Evernote forum, it provoked 5,320 replies (at latest count) -- mostly negative.

It is abandoning its own cloud system of storage and is moving over to Google for that function. The response of users on the forum to that decision has been more mixed.

In recent months Microsoft has introduced software (for both Windows and MacOS) that makes it comparatively easy to export Evernote data to OneNote. MS now seems to be aggressively recruiting Evernote users.

WSP wrote:

In recent months Microsoft has introduced software (for both Windows and
MacOS) that makes it comparatively easy to export Evernote data to
OneNote. MS now seems to be aggressively recruiting Evernote users.

Is it really a good replacement, though? OneNote is by far the best notetaking app I've ever used for organizing material related to a specific project, but I've never felt good using it as kind of a central repository or for just grabbing random quotes I come across that I want to save. Not that Evernote was *great* for that purpose, but it got the job done.

shatteredmindofbob wrote:

Is it really a good replacement, though? OneNote is by far the best
notetaking app I've ever used for organizing material related to a
specific project, but I've never felt good using it as kind of a central
repository or for just grabbing random quotes I come across that I want
to save. Not that Evernote was *great* for that purpose, but it got the
job done.

For what it's worth, Microsoft has been talking about simplifying OneNote's storage model to make it work better for the Web and about incorporating machine learning, etc., to make finding relevant notes easier.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/whats-next-for-microsofts-onenote/

A recent in-depth comparison of Evernote and OneNote:

http://lifehacker.com/note-taking-showdown-evernote-vs-onenote-2016-editio-1765707423

Follow one user's switch:

http://www.pcmag.com/commentary/345839/evernotes-loss-is-onenotes-gain

Recent and future changes for OneNote, other Office apps:

https://fasttrack.microsoft.com/roadmap

shatteredmindofbob wrote:

Is it really a good replacement, though? OneNote is by far the best
notetaking app I’ve ever used for organizing material related to a
specific project, but I’ve never felt good using it as kind of a central
repository or for just grabbing random quotes I come across that I want
to save. Not that Evernote was *great* for that purpose, but it got the
job done.

_________________________________________

As a past Evernote user, I have had an approx. 8-year experiment with OneNote, and this post summarises it:
Microsoft OneNote - how to make it your 21st century Zettelkasten PIM.
https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=31755.msg393032#msg393032

It can be a difficult change to make, and it's not necessarily easy to learn to use all of its features - rather like MS Word - but the investment of time and effort in making the change has paid off, in my case at least, though YMMV.
In terms of cost, I have been using a $10 MS Office Pro Corporate Home Use licence on Office 2007 through 2016 (i.e., $10 each version). I skipped one of the versions - 2010. This would be good value for OneNote alone, but since I use most of the other MS Office software and OneNote now integrates very well with OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) of MS Office objects, and has wiki-like linking, and can pretty much take all the data types one throws at it (referred to at the link), it has become an indispensable tool for me.
It's rather like a combination of Evernote + Adobe/Ashton-Tate(?) Framework V - on steroids, but (sadly) without the structure of the latter - and of course it can be client-based, or web-based, or both.
I'm still learning about it and discovering its potential limitations/constraints.