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Wanderling Reborn

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Wanderling Reborn last won the day on September 2 2017

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  1. This only works in a growth market, which it isn't anymore. Evernote is making the bulk of its money from their long time users who are deeply invested into its services, not from new converts. They, basically, switched to the rent-seeking model. Let's take 10 existing users paying over $10 a month. Let's assume that if EN offers a $5 plan, 3 of them switch to the lower tier. Evernote would need to bring 3 additional users just to maintain the existing revenue stream, 4 to make more money - so they would need to grow the number of paid users by 40% to bring in 5% more revenue, if you do the math. I think increasing their paid user numbers by 40% by going with a $60 per year plan is simply not realistic - it hasn't happened historically when they charged that much, and now there's a whole lot more competition. I also think that the number of existing paid users switching to a cheaper plan, if it becomes available, is going to be a whole lot more than 30%. And the higher percentage of existing paid users switch to a cheaper plan, the more new paid users they need to bring in just to keep the same revenue. Not very likely to happen.
  2. So, now I got curious myself, and downloaded the pre-release version of Joplin which has the OCR built-in. Basically, it will OCR attached PDFs in the background, and when searching for text, it will show the list of PDFs that have that text in them. Then you need to individually open and search inside of each file to find that text in that specific file. I don't believe it works on pasted images, at least not yet. But then, it's just a pre-release. So, they seem to be moving in the right direction.
  3. That's not quite true... There's OCR (via plugin, and AFAIK they are working on making it part of the base package). There's pdf export (via desktop app). There's basic task functionality with alerts. And a few decent enough plugins. There's actually fairly decent functionality overall if you use desktop app and plugins. Which is where my problems come. I use mobile clients 3/4 of my time. Joplin's mobile client on iOS is very limited. Most of the niceties that I actually like are only available on the desktop. More importantly, I don't trust community developed software with any sensitive data, be it financial or health records or anything else. It's just too valuable and too easy of a target. This is the prime reason I no longer use Linux as my primary OS. I don't want to start a holy war, and fully respect other people's views, but imho a software project with millions lines of code submitted by thousands of anonymous contributors from all over the world is a disaster waiting to happen, and I have neither the skills nor the time to properly secure it on my end. And I absolutely don't buy the "millions eyes on the code" line. Most of these eyes have no idea what to look for, and those who do are very busy working on paid projects. But if you don't have issues with FOSS, and mostly use desktop apps, and don't mind Markdown, Joplin i's really not that bad.
  4. I don't like Joplin all that much, for a variety of reasons. But it's a free open source software. While one person (Laurent) seems to be doing most of the core work (or, at least, most of coordination) there's a whole community of code contributors. It's very unlikely that Joplin would ever become a paid software, as it is being developed as a hobby project by a community of people and the source code is always freely available for anyone to compile or fork. It's also unlikely that the development will fully cease even if Laurent quits working on it, as there's too many active users and contributors, and someone will step in and pick up the code. In a way, Joplin is like a Linux distro. As long as enough people with coding skills have interest in it, someone will maintain it. And by its very nature, it seems to attract people who like coding. (One of the biggest issues I have with Markdown is that you're not as much writing your note as coding it).
  5. Double the price, lose third of subscribers, you still come ahead in revenue. And I don't think an entire third of already paying subscribers is going to leave over this. They are combining this price increase with making the free version far les usable, clearly in the hope that at least some of the free users will pay up. Again, if 90% of free users leave, and 10% start paying, it's a net positive for revenue. So, yes, it's a revenue grab, and I believe that in the short to intermediate term it's going to work out just fine for them. In the long term, they will have hard time keeping up with the "natural" attrition of paid users, but that's a problem for the future Evernote. It's not like they had a stellar record acquiring new paid subscribers even with the old prices.
  6. I can agree on UI. The lack of proper tags (can be worked around). The ugly, ugly, UGLY hot magenta everywhere. However, as someone who's been continuously using Onenote since 2010 (for work) and syncing since sync became available, I would say it's a very stable / mature sync platform now. Perhaps Android version is still problematic, but Windows and iOS / Mac worked fine for me for years with multiple accounts and devices. I'd say they seem to have fixed their sync engine around 2017 or so.
  7. So, help me understand it. Unless I am mistaken, the single-license product version did not have cloud connection, it was for storing the information locally on the hard drive. Are you saying that the old 2007 version that you purchased has been disabled by Evernote (assuming it can still be installed and ran on the modern OS) and can no longer work with locally stored data ? If so, you have a point. Or are you saying that your purchase of a standalone version in 2007 should entitle you to some special plan for the cloud-enabled version of today ? I am not being sarcastic, I am genuinely trying to understand what is going on. I have some software that is about that old (I am a hoarder...) Some of it no longer works or can be installed due to the changes in Windows. Some of it still works. I do not expect the companies who published these titles to keep supporting them indefinitely, but I would be absolutely mad if they issued a patch to disable the features that worked locally and did not depend on server-side processing or cloud sync.
  8. Yes, it will turn itself off when it shorts if you walk too close to a microwave. May require a replacement brain....
  9. Why would I not believe it ? This is a discussion, not a personal argument. Constructive disagreement is healthy. Sorry if I somehow came across as argumentative. In my job, one of the many "hats" I have to wear requires me to make assessments of known data, make logical assumptions, provide analysis and recommendations, and be able to explain the reasoning behind them. I am used to saying "that why I think it's X and not Y, why do you think it's Y and not X ?" Sorry if it came out as too combative, this was nevcer my intent.
  10. First, let's clarify the definitions. By "growth" I meant growth in the number of users / market share. I think I've made this pretty clear on several occasions. All indicators, to me, are showing that they are pursuing revenue growth at the expense of user base growth. The lack of an attractive free plan to encourage as many people as possible to try the service and stick with it for a while. The current free plan is designed to force people to move on sooner rather than later. They are clearly not concerned if most free users leave, as long as at least some upgrade to the new plan. The lack of an attractive entry level tier to encourage the new users to upgrade to a paid service. The current price is high compared to the competition, most of whom are providing a generous free plan or pretty cheap paid plans. So, the current pricing strategy and free plan limitations are designed to minimize the number of free users, and don't provide enough enticement for the potential new users to sign up for paid service. What it does do is to maximize the revenue from the deeply invested legacy users who have too much data committed in Evernote, and are too used to the specific EN-centric workflow they've developed over the years, to move to an alternative over $70 or so in yearly savings. This is not something "I chose to believe", it's an analysis of their pricing structure and free plan limitations as compared to the competition. Now, if you see any indicators that BS are indeed pursuing a growth strategy for Evernote, I'd like to know what they are. They may have some plans that they want to implement in the future, but as of now, their entire pricing strategy strongly emphasizes maximizing the revenue from existing users over growth by adding more new users.
  11. I don't need the inside knowledge to see very clear signs. Everything in Evernote's marketing and pricing structure indicates that the revenue growth, not user base growth, is their main strategy at this time. Which makes sense given the overall stagnation / maturity of the market, greatly increased competition, their historic failure to convert new users to paid plans, and the fact that their biggest asset is the relatively large number of deeply invested existing users. However, I will gladly acknowledge that this is just my analysis and not something they told me. By the same token, I do not know for sure that it's going to snow this winter.
  12. You sound like you feel that you are entitled to be provided a free service for ever just because you used it for free for years... this doesn't make any sense. Evernote is not a FOSS, it wasn't developed via free contributions from the wider community. It costs money to develop the software and to run the service. Evernote is a business, they are selling a product (service) to make money. At some point they decided that the free plans failed to bring in the value that they expected from them. It's perfectly within their rights to modify or outright cancel them. As long as they maintain the users' data integrity and provide them with means to export their data out and move it elsewhere, I don't see any ethical issues with the way they handled this change. I am not planning on switching to the new paid plan, just because I don't see the value in it for us (my wife is the primary user, I moved on a while ago, and she can keep her notes anywhere). But, I don't see why anyone owes me a cheap plan.
  13. Of course they can. It's a business, not a charity. (And a lot of charities are really businesses anyway...) If they double the price, and a quarter of paying customers leave, they are still making 1.5 times the old revenue with the remaining customers. The trick is to properly estimate the price increase so the number of remaining paying users is high enough. So far, I don't think they've miscalculated. There's more than a few alternatives, although none is a direct replacement.
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