Evernote Lays Off Most of Staff, Triggering Fears of Closure (thurrott.com) 28
Evernote, the note-taking and task management application, is triggering fears of closure after its parent company Bending Spoon laid off most of the company's staff and announced plans to relocate all operations to Europe. Thurrott reports: Most of the company's "operations will be transitioned to Europe," Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari told SFGate, due to the "significant boost in operational efficiency that will come as a consequence of centralizing operations in Europe." As a result, most of Evernote's staff in the San Francisco Bay area and Chile has been laid off and those offices will be closed for good.
Bending Spoons won't confirm how many Evernote employees it laid off, but Ferrari claims all is well. "Our plans for Evernote are as ambitious as ever," he said. "Going forward, a growing, dedicated team based in Europe will continue to assume ownership of the Evernote product. This team will also be in an ideal position to leverage the extensive expertise and strength of the 400-plus workforce at Bending Spoons, many of whom have been working on Evernote full-time since the acquisition." Paul Thurrott notes that Bending Spoons announced plans to acquire Evernote in November 2022. "At the time of the announcement, Mr. Ferrari said that he 'saw the potential' in Evernote, which has struggled in recent years after being a Silicon Valley startup darling a decade or more ago."
Bending Spoons won't confirm how many Evernote employees it laid off, but Ferrari claims all is well. "Our plans for Evernote are as ambitious as ever," he said. "Going forward, a growing, dedicated team based in Europe will continue to assume ownership of the Evernote product. This team will also be in an ideal position to leverage the extensive expertise and strength of the 400-plus workforce at Bending Spoons, many of whom have been working on Evernote full-time since the acquisition." Paul Thurrott notes that Bending Spoons announced plans to acquire Evernote in November 2022. "At the time of the announcement, Mr. Ferrari said that he 'saw the potential' in Evernote, which has struggled in recent years after being a Silicon Valley startup darling a decade or more ago."
they had how many people working on that dumb app? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
They had a full building. Even a small app, if it's not a one-person-in-the-bedroom-office needs people when it gets popular. 5 developers means you need someone sell the product, you need to market it, you need IT infrastructure so some people there, a legal person, accountant, HR, etc. More non-developers than developers is normal.
Re:Evernotes (Score:5, Insightful)
Are not forever notes. Google Keep is free and does similar things. Bad money driving out good. DOS beating CP/M etc etc
I'd trust Evernote to be around in a year over most services that Google offers!
Re:Evernotes (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd trust Evernote to disappear with your data and Google to allow it to be exported if past performance is anything to judge by. It's one thing to complain about Google killing products, but it seems to be one of the few companies that when they kill their products they don't annihilate your data / hardware with it.
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I'd trust Evernote to be around in a year over most services that Google offers!
True. The rule of thumb with Google is this:
a) If it's younger than 4 years, the likelihood of it disappearing is almost 100% (if it's a chat product, it's exactly 100%).
b) If it lasted beyond 4 years, then it's likely to stay around for many years more, but that depends on whether:
i. It continues receiving new features, in which case it's here for the long haul.
ii. It merely receives security fixes, but no new features, in which case it's goes on in a zombie-like, continuous state of maybe being cancelled
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You're holding up a Google product as an example of permanence? LOL.
If you really want to be sure, press cuneiform in to a tablet and bake it. We can read those now, so there's a good chance we'll be able to read them 1000 years from now, and when we read them we get utterly prosaic things like receipts; so it's not like it's so inconvenient that it was reserved for momentous occasions. It was good enough for your great^30 grandfather, it's good enough for you.
Linkedin shows that... (Score:2)
Too many other options better or free (Score:5, Interesting)
Evernote was ahead of its time when it came out. I used it for a couple of years in the early days, but they kept tightening the screws on what was free. My being hesitant to pay was that it's a perpetual subscription. Then OneNote went free on all platforms and Microsoft appears to be leaving it free though the feature development is minimal to none. I used OneNote for about 8 years as my work notebook along with other personal cloud notes. It's a good product except for the fact it's not very developer friendly. You can't type backticks and other markdown shortcuts. That's the big shortcoming.
I switched to Notion 2 years ago. It fills the gaps of OneNote and is a really good product. Some teams where I work have adopted it over Atlassian Confluence. Evernote meanwhile lost its relevance as other free and paid products compete - Apple Notes, Google Keep, Joplin.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Evernote also lacked features that other note taking apps. One of which was encryption. Not password protection, but true encryption.
It would have been nice if Evernote did add some useful features and didn't hike prices so much that one was best off just using a free notepad app that had encryption built in. At most, maybe $3-4 a month.
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I didn't like that they were online. I don't care about sharing stuff across devices, because my work computer is my work computer, I will not try to do work on my personal phone or tablet. Work is work, life is life, don't try to mix the two like all the enterprises want you to do.
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You can't type backticks? That's spectacularly lame. Before markdown existed, people were using them to emulate smart quotes in ASCII... to say nothing of their use in scripts.
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Used Evernote for about a year...... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
I think you made a wise choice. They showed you their true colours. Whether or not they backtracked is irrelevant. You know what they want (user data), and you know they won't stop looking for ways to get it.
Was a paid user from 2009 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
I went to cancel my account yesterday and they gave me 40% off on a renewal, so I'll stick around for another year.
Former paid user... (Score:2)
Really loved the product. The cross platform abilities were great. Then they buggered up the interface to the point where I went looking for alternatives. Never looked back.
Same thing happened with YNAB. New version, shit experience. Bye bye.
Use a bibliography manager (Score:3)
Both Mendeley & Zotero also have online social media-like collaboration platforms where academics can share bibliography lists, papers, etc., with their peers around the world. They also use open standards for their data models, bibliographies, etc., so that it's easy to migrate your personal database of work over to another bibliography manager. It's very useful!
I use Zotero & I reckon it's saved me hundreds, if not thousands of hours over the years (I'm not an academic but I do consume a lot of research).
I very much doubt that Mendeley or Zotero are going away any time soon either.
So many issues (Score:2)
I was a paying customer for many years, but switched out of frustration.
For example forcing the Todo-list on everybody. You basically couldn't click "New note" any more in the desktop client, you had to click "New" then click "Note" (and not Task). They also had their constant nagging of upgrading Pro, even on an already paid subscriptions. I had absolutely no use for the Pro f
Unsurprising (Score:2)
Once upon a time people might have needed a 3rd party notes app. But these days one is bundled into the OS. It's unsurprising if Evernotes is struggling.
We are headed towards another dot.com crash (Score:2)
So many of the most popular things on the web today have NEVER made a profit, and have been living for years off of Venture Capital money. That VC money is about to dry up with the economic downturn, and we will find that many of the most popular websites on the internet will have to turn out the lights.
Fears of closure? Nah. (Score:2)
Is just that Eastern European programmers are cheaper than North american programmers, and just as good (if not better). And yes, bendingspoons is located in Italy, but you can bet that many of their programmers work remotely from Eastern European countries. Add to that the evident time differences between GMT+1 and GMT+4,5,6 to coordinate the deveklopment teams...
And to market Baloney, the Italians are top notch. Hey! they even invented it! So moving the marketingand sales activities of evernote in house m
Long-time paid user no longer (Score:1)
I was a paid user for Evernote from 2010 until last year, with thousands of notes. It was the center of my GTD system - until they lobotomized the app.
In the name of efficiency, they unified the code base across all platforms and took away some of the most useful features. I used to be able to create notes via Siri on my iPhone, which was incredibly useful while driving. Then they put a new interface in place and required you to pay for a higher tier to be able to rearrange it, and you couldn't skip it
Was paid customer until yesterday (Score:2)
In addition to the rumors about layoffs and closure, they emailed me yesterday about a whopping price increase. Here's how it went down:
1) I start using Evernote in 2009 on all of my devices, and eventually started paying for the yearly subscription at about $74/year.
2) Email arrives saying they're raising my rate to $129.99/year. The email acknowledges that "By introducing new pricing, we know we risk upsetting valued Evernote customers like you." Ya think?
3) I look at Evernote alternatives (like Joplin, w
Clipping from the web (Score:1)
Re: Clipping from the web (Score:1)