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Wanderling Reborn

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Everything posted by Wanderling Reborn

  1. I wasn't talking about data. The data may not be locked in, but devoted users are. They won't find another Evernote to switch to. They have years of habits, established workflow, and it will be irreplaceable. Their devotion is not boundless, of course, but strong enough that they will continue paying for years to come. So if $8 per month is the only rate, they will pay $8. I bet the majority of these users would pay $15.
  2. These people are paying $8 over Basic because they are locked in and have no choice. Who do you think will pick that $2 plan ? If new users, it needs to be at the very least attractive enough to compete with gazillion of free and cheap plans offered by Notion, Onenote, Bear, SimpleNote, Keep, Apple Notes, etc. etc. etc. And this means it will look attractive enough to a large percentage of current Premium users as well. Or, they make it restrictive, along the lines of what you proposed. Which will still not entice too many new users from outside of Evernote, maybe convert some existing Basic users, with the possibility of some Premium users still downgrading because they mainly need multi device access. I am not going to post pros and cons and prices on this forum, this would look like promoting competing services. But I do suggest you look at pricing plans vs features of competitors. Evernote is easily the most expensive of the bunch. They are not growing - probably slowly shrinking - but they have a somewhat secure revenue source from people who are married to their service. So, do they endanger their existing captive golden egg paying user base for a pie in the sky ? That's the big question.
  3. The problem is the current pricing. It pretty much holds them hostage and severely limits what they can do as a company. When you look at the prices that their competition charges, the current Premium plan is too high. Long term users will pay it to keep thousands of notes and workflow they came to depend on over the years, but most people who are not already deeply invested into the service will just shrug and move on. To attract new users, they must make a compelling value proposition - but this is a Catch-22. If it’s too attractive, the current paying users may switch over to the new cheaper plan, and they lose the revenue they came to depend on, with no guarantees of more paying customers. If it’s not attractive enough, they’re back to square one, with slow attrition of old paid customers and no new ones. I don’t have a solution for this.
  4. I actually read his statement as saying that Evernote needs to visually rebrand itself to appeal to broad new audience. A fresh new look. Which is probably true. Just changing colors would not do it. Pretty much everyone even remotely interested had already tried the service and most moved on. To make them interested again, something needs to change. But it was the data in that article that I mainly pointed to. However, this would not fix the pricing predicament that they put themselves in. They are charging premium prices compared to the rest of competitors, yet they are not seen as a premium product, or even a top suggested product. On the other hand, they have a fairly sizable core group of dedicated legacy users who are now, I suspect, the main revenue source. They can’t attract new users without reimagining the service and dropping prices, and they can’t drastically revamp the service and drop prices without both pissing off the core users and losing revenue. I think you are right, it’s almost like they need to split into two separate products.
  5. This is indeed the main thing. Evernote failed to convince newbies to buy a paid subscription when it was a cool, industry-defining service that everyone was talking about and with very little competition and low subscription price. Now that it’s an old dinosaur brand in a market filled with shiny new toys, with a restrictive free plan and jacked up price... this is an even tougher task than the one they couldn’t pull off years ago. I’ve kept repeating myself for years here... Jacking up prices while severely limiting the free plan turned away new potential users and greatly contributed to Evernote brand stagnation. It may have not been a mistake, but rather a deliberate last ditch attempt to buy time and temporarily increase revenue at the expense of loyal core user base, giving up on attracting new users in hope that this is all temporary and the redesign will fix everything (and the conversion rates were low anyway). Venturing into business space was a mistake. Evernote had, predictably, failed to make a dent in the market. They are at their core a consumer company, not a business company. This cost them wasted effort and misdirected funding. They think of themselves as a unicorn, but to the average new user they are a dinosaur. Most people coming to this market today were in elementary school when Evernote was famous. They lack things that many modern users consider basic - handwriting, for one. Full note encryption. Some modern apps lack features too - but they benefit from still being new and cool and talked about. (Notion, I am looking at you...) If I knew how to fix it, I’d be running companies instead of managing projects. Personally, I think they are way overpriced, for starters. Just compare EN pricing and included features with most competition. But they may have put themselves in a situation where they just can’t cut prices without sinking, not unless they secure major new funding. Time will tell...
  6. Have you read this ? The Rise, Fall, and Future of Evernote (profitwell.com)
  7. This would indeed be a prize winning answer, wouldn't it ? As I said... go on Reddit (simply because it's arguably the biggest place where people are asking such questions, which is not tied to a specific OS or product) and make a search for "recommend notetaking" or "how you take notes". See what people have been recommending for the past few years. And how often Evernote is even mentioned. It's no longer the default name people think of, it's a blast from the past, something that was cool ten years ago. Raising prices did not fix the low user conversion rate, it only masked that problem by forcing more money out of the core group of Evernote faithful. Eliminating the free tier will likewise not force more people to convert to paid, it will just make potential new users even less likely to try it, many existing free users will quit altogether, and the overall number of active accounts will go down. Venturing into business space was a mistake, and I called it out on this forum years ago. The % of business accounts is what now, mere 15% of revenue ? Jacking up prices the way they did was a mistake (I am not saying that they should not have restructured their pricing structure, but they did it wrong). I bet you that the majority of current paid users have joined the service before the price hike. Evernote must make itself cool and attractive again, and humbly accept that it's no longer a unicorn, but a dinosaur.
  8. Sorry, but the highlighted line is pure fanboyism. Go to a place like Reddit and see what people use and recommend for notetaking. Especially in the Apple and Windows ecosystems. Evernote is not anywhere near top. (Neither is Onenote, when it comes to Apple users). A lot of people prefer and recommend Notability, or Goodnotes, AppleNotes, Notion, Bear, etc. Evernote is rarely at the top of the list. Keep is limited but perfectly fine for people who don't need power user features. Which is, apparently, the majority of Evernote users. Onenote is slowly but surely taking up market share, especially as 2-in-1 laptops and Surfaces are getting more popular just as MS is finally making a major push into educational space (a decade late, but not too late this time). MS and Google pretty much own .edu, and this is translating into major exposure and user habit forming. Do you think Evernote can afford to limit their exposure right now ? Without a Basic version, the number of people even trying Evernote out will dwindle quite drastically. And if Evernote has hard enough time making people convert now, it will be even harder if these users are faced with having to make a commitment after a 30 day trial. Realize that a large percentage of current Basic users are not really using the service - they opened an account, played with it for a while, then pretty much abandoned it. They will not convert. This move would just result in less people even being willing to evaluate the service in first place.
  9. Don't know if you're joking, but this would be a perfect suicide. If they have issues making people pay after using the service for a few years and realizing they need more features that they are willing to pay for, how are they hoping to make people pay without given them a chance to even get used to the service ? That's what I did with most of my notes and records, actually. After converting them from EN to ON and going with ON for a few years, I just converted them all again into a mix of HTML, PDF, and Word, relying on built-in indexing search in Onedrive to find what I am looking for. (My wife is still using Evernote and expects me to maintain her notes, though ) DOCX is now an open format and is actually more common than RTF. The only issue with this approach was taking notes on mobile devices (specifically iOS, as that's what our family uses). Taking a quick note in MS Word on the desktop is easy, but Word for iOS is not optimized for quick notetaking. I used Notability and had it set to auto save PDFs in Onedrive. It looks like the new combined iOS MS Office app is actually designed for quick notetaking, but I haven't tried it yet.
  10. Not a fair comparison, IMHO. Both of these companies were market leaders (by a wide margin) in segments with broad appeal and a great earning potential (video streaming and e-commerce, respectively), growing revenue year by year, and spending much of it to achieve an even bigger market penetration and technological advantage over their rivals. They had the money to book profits, but decided to use these funds to expand even further instead. Evernote (and all of its rivals) are competing in a relatively small, niche market, with limited earnings potential (compared to the content delivery and e-commerce) and lots of competition, including free offerings from software behemoths like Google and MS. And this market (not just Evernote as a company, but the entire notetaking market) is well past its prime as far as the hype is concerned. It is no longer the shiny new technology that everyone talks about or wants to try, it's about as mundane as scan apps. So, not the same thing at all.
  11. Per Evernote's reply, it seems pretty clear that this is a known problem on their end. So not a hypothetical. This issue impacted both paying and free users. This is not about device limitations. This is about data integrity. Device limitations and feature limitations are fine. Losing access to your data is not. "We don't guarantee access to your data unless you pay up" is not a good message. However, I doubt that Evernote chose you as their spokesman.
  12. I am not sure that the bolded part is true in this case. The problem with going Premium for a month is that the user is basically being forced to pay for support even if they were locked out via a service error. I understand not providing support for free accounts, but there’s got to be a clear way to get hold of Evernote in emergency situations which may be due to problems on their end.
  13. Whether they are paying users or not, as long as they are using the service as intended, Evernote has a responsibility to protect users' data that was entrusted to them, and provide a path to recovery if the problem was on their end. Same goes for the hundreds of millions of people using free email services from Google and Microsoft and Apple and what not. If Google tomorrow just wiped out millions of users' accounts without warning, they would be hit with class action lawsuits and government agency investigations and the fact that it's a "free service" would not help them. Besides, this is a question of professionalism. If a free user's account can be deactivated by mistake, and the only way to fix it is by begging for help on a users' forum and hoping that someone can alert the company, this does not instill much confidence in the internal processes or business organization.
  14. I've used TruCrypt for many years (the predecessor to VeraCrypt). Cryptomator works in the same way, except that instead of a single dynamic volume, it creates a folder with multiple subfolders. The lack of mobile access was the main drawback. Otherwise, it's the same functionality.
  15. This is precisely what I did with all my data a few years ago. First, moved from EN to ON, then after a while decided that I didn’t really need a wrapper around my data, and moved or all inside a folder structure. Worked great, so far.
  16. I did look at Boxcryptor but didn’t like their subscription price. I ended up using a free open source cross platform software called Cryptomator. Well, it’s free for desktop, a small one time payment for mobile app, and I did send them a donation. It’s been rock solid in the several years that I’ve been using it. It’s available on Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS and Android, and I did use it on all of these platforms except Mac. There are a few drawbacks with this approach. First - for obvious reasons - the encrypted files are not being indexed. So on the mobile, I have to rely on an organized folder structure to find what I am looking for. On the desktop, I am using a standalone indexing program (DocFetcher) that is saved inside encrypted folder, so the index is encrypted and inaccessible without mounting Cryptomator first. Second, on iOS I can’t edit any files directly from within Cryptomator, I have to export them for editing then re-import back. This is more of an iOS limitation and would be the same for any service that doesn’t have built in editing tools. Third, and this is specific to Cryptomator, I don’t think the mobile version will work without interned access (the desktop versions work with local data and sync is handled by whatever service you place your container into). So in a nutshell, it’s great for file storage, and great for editing on the desktop. Not so great for doing much editing on mobile.
  17. You don’t just deactivate a user account “for security reasons” without (1) informing the user (2) providing an explanation (3) providing means to contact support and reverse the action. Especially when you’re talking about a service that people store their important and often irreplaceable data in. This is... mind boggling.
  18. Why don't you use Onenote for meeting notes and daily activity? It's so well integrated with Office, Outlook and Teams, you're really missing out if you're not using it for that. (Onenote 2016, as Windows 10 app is too limited). E.g. when I have a meeting, with just one click I create a Onenote page with all meeting data - including a sign in list where I can check off attendee names, agenda, and a Notes section. All of that is automatically copied from Outlook. I then brainstorm the meeting ahead of time under Notes, add links to relevant documents and emails (or just copy them as attachments), and add checkmarks with all questions that need to be covered, checking them off as we go. Any notes to myself that I don't want to share with meeting go into a collapsed outline on the right side of note, outside the main body. If any actionable items come up during meeting, I create Outlook tasks right from my notes, without leaving Onenote. When I am done, I export meeting notes to PDF, and distribute them to meeting participants with a few clicks in Outlook (right click on meeting in calendar, "Reply all", click on attachment icon, it will automatically suggest the last document created in any Office app). The "tags" (which are not really tags) is also a very powerful feature, when used right. It's a major time saver.
  19. The problem with Joplin, for me, is that it's all but useless on iOS. And if I only used my data on the desktop, I'd just put it in Onedrive / Google drive as regular documents. Both these services have PDF and image OCR, something Joplin doesn't do. Onenote is indispensable for work if your organization is using Outlook and Office, the level of integration is fantastic (MS does a very poor job promoting its best features, or how they can be used to simplify a Project Manager's life). Evernote is a great alternative otherwise. With Joplin, I am not sure what it would do for me that I can't get with text notes, Word and Excel files stored in Onedrive and indexed.
  20. LOL but for us the end users it was primarily a Mail application. And it SUCKED. Big time. The “Interface Hall of Shame” website had an entire separate section dedicated to Lotus Notes - while most other software got a paragraph. Well deserved, too. Switching from LN to Outlook was a breath of fresh air. While Outlook may not have the advance database features of LN, as an email / calendar/ task manager it’s indefinitely better.
  21. MS' problem is that it's a very squarely business oriented company, which has no idea how to market to consumers, doesn't really care for the consumer market, and is losing because of this big time, over and over again. Just look at them having a full featured, modern mobile OS years before Google and Apple, yet doing nothing about it for years until it was too late.
  22. MS never really marketed Onenote. Even for the past few years, as they poured more attention into the service, especially the mobile side of things and the abortive W10 app, they’ve been doing a piss poor job promoting it. And before that, tens of millions of people had it preinstalled on their work and business computers along with the rest of Office, and had zero idea of what it was or what to use it for (or even that they had it). MS had really dropped the ball there.
  23. What's wrong with comparing software ? At the end of the day, it's only user experience that counts. Just because Joplin is open source, doesn't mean that it's providing a comparable user experience for the majority of users - there will always be some people for whom some of the features are super important. As to Microsoft - they gave a clear timeline for Onenote 2016 being supported through November 2025. (Although it seems that they had reversed the direction altogether and once again are actively developing the desktop version, due to strong user pushback). I really dislike Microsoft's propensity to kill or drastically change ecosystems that their users are reliant upon, and I got burned with them more than once - Windows Mobile, Wunderlist, MS Money. But they always provided an early warning, a sunset date, and a path out. So, at the very least, Evernote team should clearly communicate their plan for extending support for the legacy version - right now, they are basically avoiding commitment, which is bad from users' perspective. "We will support this version until Summer 2021" is, at least, some form of guarantee.
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