Sad state of Evernote
Started by rafael costacurta
on 12/3/2022
rafael costacurta
12/3/2022 6:24 pm
Evernote was bought and there was not single mention to it in this esteemed house of productivity affairs...
https://evernote.com/blog/bending-spoons-to-acquire-evernote/
The guys form Keep Porductive believe there will be a comeback, lets see...
https://www.keepproductive.com/blog/2022/8/19/biggest-2023-productivity-predictions?rq=predictions
https://evernote.com/blog/bending-spoons-to-acquire-evernote/
The guys form Keep Porductive believe there will be a comeback, lets see...
https://www.keepproductive.com/blog/2022/8/19/biggest-2023-productivity-predictions?rq=predictions
satis
12/4/2022 4:24 pm
The "guys" at Keep Product is just Francesco D'Alessio. His site has posts supplemented by content by for-hire writer Charlotte who creates SEO-friendly posts for several clients. I don't know what he's said lately but when the announcement was made three weeks ago D'Alessio wrote on Medium, "Evernote as we know it could be dead.... Evernote haven’t had a hideously thriving community since 2016, due to the lack of innovation"
I think Evernote is a goner. It got shunted off to a small Milan-based company without experience in productivity software; it makes apps like video editor Splice, 30 Day Fitness, Live Quiz and photo editor Remini. The purchase price is unknown but I bet it was quite low because the purchaser doesn't have a lot of funding. (At one point Evernote had 250 million users and was valued at $8 billion. Not any more.) Bending Spoons offers no promises that Evernote will be forthcoming with a much-needed overhaul. And this is at a time when membership continues to shrink in the face of free and cheap competition (OneNote, Joplin, Notion, Apple Notes, UpNote, etc etc). On iOS it doesn't even rank in the Top 100 Productivity apps by download.
And Evernote has been increasing subscription pricing by approximately 50% for grandfathered Plus/Pemium plans (to $50-$65/year), annoying a lot of users in the app's subreddit. The current Personal plan is $90/year (though you can sometimes get 50%-off that for one year). Compared to robust competition available at a fraction of the price, or free, I don't think Evernote offers enough advantages to most users or potential users.
I think Evernote is a goner. It got shunted off to a small Milan-based company without experience in productivity software; it makes apps like video editor Splice, 30 Day Fitness, Live Quiz and photo editor Remini. The purchase price is unknown but I bet it was quite low because the purchaser doesn't have a lot of funding. (At one point Evernote had 250 million users and was valued at $8 billion. Not any more.) Bending Spoons offers no promises that Evernote will be forthcoming with a much-needed overhaul. And this is at a time when membership continues to shrink in the face of free and cheap competition (OneNote, Joplin, Notion, Apple Notes, UpNote, etc etc). On iOS it doesn't even rank in the Top 100 Productivity apps by download.
And Evernote has been increasing subscription pricing by approximately 50% for grandfathered Plus/Pemium plans (to $50-$65/year), annoying a lot of users in the app's subreddit. The current Personal plan is $90/year (though you can sometimes get 50%-off that for one year). Compared to robust competition available at a fraction of the price, or free, I don't think Evernote offers enough advantages to most users or potential users.
Anthony
12/4/2022 7:01 pm
satis wrote:
The Bending Spoons' app that probably comes closed (incredibly) to the "cloudy" Evernote is Immuni: a free app (iOS and Android only) used in Italy to trace and inform about Covid. It was downloaded by 15mil. people (or more), since it was officially supported and promoted by the government in 2020. The trace part of it never fully worked, but probably this was due to the lack of NHS expertise to share data. Nevertheless - I guess - BS developed some skills in dealing with privacy, dashboard, and cloud stuff.
They were also able to rise from investors in the summer $340 mil, which were probably used - in part or in full - for the acquisition.
Source:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/hollywood-star-tech-execs-invest-italian-start-up-bending-spoons-2022-09-27
It got shunted off to a small Milan-based
company without experience in productivity software; it makes apps like
video editor Splice, 30 Day Fitness, Live Quiz and photo editor Remini.
The purchase price is unknown but I bet it was quite low because the
purchaser doesn't have a lot of funding.
The Bending Spoons' app that probably comes closed (incredibly) to the "cloudy" Evernote is Immuni: a free app (iOS and Android only) used in Italy to trace and inform about Covid. It was downloaded by 15mil. people (or more), since it was officially supported and promoted by the government in 2020. The trace part of it never fully worked, but probably this was due to the lack of NHS expertise to share data. Nevertheless - I guess - BS developed some skills in dealing with privacy, dashboard, and cloud stuff.
They were also able to rise from investors in the summer $340 mil, which were probably used - in part or in full - for the acquisition.
Source:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/hollywood-star-tech-execs-invest-italian-start-up-bending-spoons-2022-09-27
Christoph
12/4/2022 9:42 pm
Stephen Zeoli
12/5/2022 6:22 pm
I still keep an Evernote account as a backup for gathering random information. The one thing Evernote hasn't been beaten at (in my view) is in the ubiquitous methods for putting data into it. For a long time I have found the interface confounding and uninviting, so it is not my primary PKM... shockingly, that's still a work in progress and probably always will be.
I don't think we can know yet just what the acquisition of Evernote will mean. If history is a guide, it will mean the slow fading away of Evernote... that's what seems to always happen, whether it is whether it is ECCO Pro being acquired by Symantec, or Brainstorm being acquired by whomever that was, or, well, you name it. When another company acquires an established app, it usually is bad news for users. But that isn't necessarily a foregone conclusion. Let's see what happens.
BTW, I am interested in counterpoints... where the acquisition of an established app ended up improving the service for the users. Any thoughts?
Steve
I don't think we can know yet just what the acquisition of Evernote will mean. If history is a guide, it will mean the slow fading away of Evernote... that's what seems to always happen, whether it is whether it is ECCO Pro being acquired by Symantec, or Brainstorm being acquired by whomever that was, or, well, you name it. When another company acquires an established app, it usually is bad news for users. But that isn't necessarily a foregone conclusion. Let's see what happens.
BTW, I am interested in counterpoints... where the acquisition of an established app ended up improving the service for the users. Any thoughts?
Steve
Alexander Deliyannis
12/5/2022 9:14 pm
I don't know about improving, but personally I'm happy enough if things don't get worse by an acquisition.
A (rare) case in point is Trello; though I am not a user myself, my understanding is that its acquisition by Atlassian didn't spoil it.
https://blog.trello.com/trello-atlassian
The integration between Trello and Confluence would apparently be possible even without the acquisition, but that's OK too:
https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/use-trello-and-confluence-together/
As for Evernote, with more than 80,000 notes in my account, I really hope that it will be spared the fate of the examples you gave!
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
A (rare) case in point is Trello; though I am not a user myself, my understanding is that its acquisition by Atlassian didn't spoil it.
https://blog.trello.com/trello-atlassian
The integration between Trello and Confluence would apparently be possible even without the acquisition, but that's OK too:
https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/use-trello-and-confluence-together/
As for Evernote, with more than 80,000 notes in my account, I really hope that it will be spared the fate of the examples you gave!
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
BTW, I am interested in counterpoints... where the acquisition of an
established app ended up improving the service for the users. Any
thoughts?
rafael costacurta
12/5/2022 10:22 pm
Automattic (of wordpress fame) bought Simplenote sometime ago…. And Simplenote looks to be working just fine…. Not much new stuff being added, but, you know, it’s the SIMPLEnote…
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
BTW, I am interested in counterpoints... where the acquisition of an
established app ended up improving the service for the users. Any
thoughts?
Steve
Anthony
12/6/2022 3:32 pm
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
Examples are reactive materials: difficult to find and to manage. But let me try.
A speculation first. Acquisitions occur in at least two ways, i.e. in two directions. Either because the market of that app is growing, or because it is shrinking. The future is uncertain though, so it is not always possible to ascertain which case is which. Apart this "small” identification problem, the prospects of the former case seems usually better than the latter.
Examples:
Let me start with a classic outliner: MindManager. It seems still in relatively good health (at least for the corporate market).
It was created in the 1990s, then it was sold, in its infancy, by its inventor, Mike Jetter. At the beginning of 2000 MM XP was very good for personal use in my opinion. Then Corel acquired Mindjet (MM’s software house) in 2016: I guess corporate users did not complain.
Another similar example in the knowledge domain maybe Endnote, created in 1989. It has changed several time hands. But it seems still an established biblio-app. I shall not venture in the social media, but the temptation of mentioning Instagram and Wathsapp (acquired by Facebook), or Skype acquired in 2011 by Microsoft could be also used as examples of acquisition that did not ruin what they bought.
A good - and mixed - example that illustrates how liquid is the software landscape on this matter, comes from Adobe acquiring Macromedia in 2005: some established apps indeed died (Freehand). However, some others survived and grew so to became standard, such as Dreamweaver.
BTW, I am interested in counterpoints... where the acquisition of an established app ended up improving the service for the users. Any thoughts?
Examples are reactive materials: difficult to find and to manage. But let me try.
A speculation first. Acquisitions occur in at least two ways, i.e. in two directions. Either because the market of that app is growing, or because it is shrinking. The future is uncertain though, so it is not always possible to ascertain which case is which. Apart this "small” identification problem, the prospects of the former case seems usually better than the latter.
Examples:
Let me start with a classic outliner: MindManager. It seems still in relatively good health (at least for the corporate market).
It was created in the 1990s, then it was sold, in its infancy, by its inventor, Mike Jetter. At the beginning of 2000 MM XP was very good for personal use in my opinion. Then Corel acquired Mindjet (MM’s software house) in 2016: I guess corporate users did not complain.
Another similar example in the knowledge domain maybe Endnote, created in 1989. It has changed several time hands. But it seems still an established biblio-app. I shall not venture in the social media, but the temptation of mentioning Instagram and Wathsapp (acquired by Facebook), or Skype acquired in 2011 by Microsoft could be also used as examples of acquisition that did not ruin what they bought.
A good - and mixed - example that illustrates how liquid is the software landscape on this matter, comes from Adobe acquiring Macromedia in 2005: some established apps indeed died (Freehand). However, some others survived and grew so to became standard, such as Dreamweaver.
yosemite
12/8/2022 8:42 pm
I still use Evernote 2.2 sometimes! Why? Because it is fast. FAST. Fastest program I have, I think. Thousands of notes, tables and images and more, instant as-I-type search, blah blah.
Most of my notes now are just text so I've switched to Obsidian but also use dynalist and workflowy for outlining excellence.
I don't follow current Evernote but this news sounds to me like satis is right and it's in a death spiral.
Most of my notes now are just text so I've switched to Obsidian but also use dynalist and workflowy for outlining excellence.
I don't follow current Evernote but this news sounds to me like satis is right and it's in a death spiral.
steveylang
12/8/2022 9:00 pm
That's crazy...I guess this makes EverNote the MySpace of PKM...
satis wrote:
satis wrote:
At one point Evernote had 250 million users and was valued at $8 billion. Not any more.