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Technology

Bending Spoons To Acquire Evernote (evernote.com) 45

Evernote, in a blog post: Today we are pleased to announce that Evernote has agreed to join Bending Spoons, a leading developer of stand-out mobile apps. In the deal signed between Bending Spoons and Evernote, Bending Spoons agrees to take ownership of Evernote in a transaction expected to complete early in 2023.

For Evernote, this decision is the next strategic step forward on our journey to be an extension of your brain. The path we've taken in recent years -- rebuilding our apps in order to expand Evernote's utility and deepen its appeal -- has made possible new features, deep focus on our customers, and ultimately, an #everbetter productivity solution on the cusp of the next stage of innovation and growth. Teaming up with Bending Spoons will speed that journey, accelerating the delivery of improvements across our Teams, Professional, Personal, and Free offerings.

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Bending Spoons To Acquire Evernote

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  • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @11:31AM (#63055744)

    Uri Geller, is that you?

  • by ctilsie242 ( 4841247 ) on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @11:36AM (#63055764)

    Evernote is pretty good, but as time has gone on, there are programs that give it a run for the money. For multi-platform note-taking, it is still solid, but if one mainly does work on a single platform, something like Apple's notes, knotes, or similar can do the job... and not require a subscription fee of $8.99 to $10.99 a month.

    • by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @11:43AM (#63055788)

      Seems like google docs would do the same thing.

    • Evernote is pretty good, but as time has gone on, there are programs that give it a run for the money.

      Sure, because what it does is pretty minimal. Its biggest problem is that everything it does can be done by a relatively simple website. Even a talented amateur can bang-out an Evernote clone from Drupal or probably even Wordpress in under a week from what passes from scratch (i.e. a framework with a bunch of freely available modules.)

      • by DonRoberto ( 1146645 ) on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @06:48PM (#63056894)
        After reading your post, it's pretty clear you have very little depth of experience with the product you're commenting on. Evernote is like a hyper sophisticated luxury swiss army knife for note taking. I work on it, and I use it extensively for both personal and for work projects. From web clipper allowing you to save entire web pages to a note seamlessly and beautifully, to instant OCR based search of text across all of your stored PDFs and screenshots, to note templates for rapidly creating specialized content, to fast inline PDF modification, to being able to publish your notes to the web, to a surprisingly attractive and responsive user interface hand tailored for optimal mobile and desktop and web utilization... there's plenty here to consume an entire development team for years if you truly want to recreate the product. I've started businesses, planned my house, laid out curriculums, created proposals, and worked on numerous complex projects in Evernote; and I would never go back to Google docs. Docs and similar free note products are clunky, unattractive, and simplistic after using Evernote consistently. If you want a high end note taking and information management experience, you want Evernote. But if what you truly want is just a web based notepad (which is *not* what Evernote is)... well then that is indeed a single day web project playing around with Javascript on AWS/GCS.
    • by blahbooboo ( 839709 ) on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @11:48AM (#63055810)
      Dont forget Onenote which became much better than Evernote, has both web and real applications, and is free.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      Evernote WAS pretty good. Then a bit back they completely destroyed virtually all functionality of their apps and completely destroyed their own business.

      • I used Evernote for many years, but ever since they switched to a unified web-based codebase it's just been awful. It just feels so... slow and bloated. You can just tell it's doing an API call for every little thing.

        It also nags you so much. It brings up a pop-up window every time there's an update (like once a week), and even when I was paying for their mid-tier service it still liked to constantly remind me that I could upgrade to its next tier.

        I switched to Obsidian and I'm so much happier (even if thei

    • by SvnLyrBrto ( 62138 ) on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @12:06PM (#63055862)

      Correction: Evernote used to be pretty good.

      A few years back though, they discontinued their native app and replaced it with a shitty web app wrapped in an Electron shell. It broke with existing and standard UI conventions. The performance and stability dropped dramatically. And it was stripped of several features and in general seriously dumbed down. And when people complained, they alternated between trying to gaslight us into believing that this was a good thing somehow, and simply telling us "tough shit."

      I stuck it out for a few months, but dropped Evernote when my annual subscription was up for renewal and switched to Apple Notes. Notes is still not as good as Evernote was before Electron. But it's a lot better than Electron Evernote. And unlike Evernote, Notes has been getting consistently better, not worse. If these new owners shitcan the Electron version and anyone those involved in that decision or implementation; and bring back and resume development on the native apps, I might be willing to give them a chance. But otherwise? I'm not going to pay extra for a glorified website pretending to be an app; that is slower, less stable, and is missing features versus both its own predecessor and what's included in the OS.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by fear025 ( 763732 )

      Standard Notes is a pretty good alternative. It's open source, and free to use if you don't need rich text. You can even run your own server if security is an issue.

    • I pay the $69.99 per year for a product (Evernote) to avoid being the product.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @11:47AM (#63055800)
    Evernote was great and the market leader until they pissed it all away. Over time they had bizarre product additions, money grabbing schemes, and buggy apps. I moved on years ago to better products.
    • Agreed. It's like the management from Firefox and Evernote read the same FastCompany article on "how to disregard your core product and focus on ancillary crap you have no expertise about" in order to slowly become irrelevant

    • Most successful major software has this problem, long term. They (at least feel they) have to keep adding new features so that people will be willing to keep giving them money. But, from the point of view of the typical user, the software becomes feature-complete pretty quickly - anything they add after that is at best wanted only by a small minority of users, and at worst actively detracts from the usability of the product.

      Heck, I bet if you looked into it you'd find that mid-1980s Microsoft Multiplan alre

    • by fermion ( 181285 )
      I am no longer an Evernote user but it does not matter as they were never going to make any money off me

      To me the question is what kind of app can support a development team or company long term. Maybe an individual who sells a thousand copies a month for $5 and gets three feels some success and can gain a livelihood.

      Evernote likely supported a person or small team. As it grew, they likely wanted more profit. But it is not an app that has an obvious revenue stream.

  • Yawn (Score:2, Funny)

    They already make a bunch of nonsense. This can be added to the pile.
  • if they are finding answers from the great beyond.
  • by Petersko ( 564140 ) on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @03:13PM (#63056382)

    Evernote did things nothing else on my radar did. I used it a lot. One of the best things was the ability to copy/paste web pages into it nearly seamlessly. Throw on the fact that your notes showed up the same cross-platform - including my iPad, and it was terrific. Using templates, I managed my professional life within it.

    Then they made changes.... extensive ones that I didn't care for... and suddenly the value proposition dropped like a stone. I view it's collapse for me just like that which happened with another product that I loved - "YNAB". Perfect... and then useless in one major revision.

    And so I, like others, switched to OneNote. I think it's an inferior interface compared to "legacy" Evernote, but it checks all the boxes... and it's free. It doesn't fail to meet any particular need.

  • Then they announced they were going to randomly read their user's private data. Yeah, they backtracked on that pretty quickly, but once you lose my trust you don't regain it easily. Haven't touched it since.

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