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Evernote Lays Off Most of Staff, Triggering Fears of Closure (thurrott.com) 28

Posted by BeauHD from the questionable-future dept.
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."
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Evernote Lays Off Most of Staff, Triggering Fears of Closure More

Evernote Lays Off Most of Staff, Triggering Fears of Closure

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  • There's no way Evernote took more than a dozen people to maintain (if you include Android and iOS, and the testers, and people with server versus client skillsets) and then you got the usual parasites like finance, HR, legal etc. They let their company grow and grow and eat up all the cash it was bringing in, so that when the app started to lose popularity they had no structured way to slim down again and the company eventually, basically, went bankrupt. And now the company that bought it is going to mainta

    • 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.

  • .... they have a bunch of marketing people in Japan. If they'd had anyone who had any sense that worked for them, they'd have been where Notion is right now. Skitch is still their best product, even if it doesn't do anything more special than it did in the past.

  • Too many other options better or free (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mean Variance ( 913229 ) <mean.variance@gmail.com> on Monday July 10, 2023 @10:18PM (#63675959)

    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)

      by splitstem ( 10397791 )

      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.

      • 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.

    • 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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by r0nc0 ( 566295 )
      OneNote was the only notetaking app that allowed me to write complex equations. Unfortunately since MS tied it to use only their backing storage I had to stop using it. I'll have to take a look at Notion...

  • Used Evernote for about a year...... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by strike6 ( 823490 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @12:32AM (#63676183)
    But they lost me when they decided they were going to start looking at user data. They quickly backtracked on that idea after the uproar but, at least for me, it was too late. Once you lose my trust I'm done. Found other options and never looked back.

    • 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)

    by angularbanjo ( 1521611 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @01:56AM (#63676275)
    until the spoon benders took it over and hiked the subscription this year. Would not surprise me if paid users have left in droves in the past months because of this and the uncertainty going forward. I backed up all my note content into Joplin (kind of an open source Evernote Lite) and dropped my account to the free tier. There is not a true like-for-like alternative; many things like Notion, OneNote, etc have some subset of Evernote features but not others, e.g. ability to geo tag notes and search on gps radius, powerful search features generally, tagging, ocr, and so on. The value really was as an infinite filing cabinet where you want to store things away and be sure you could find it some day when you needed it. Shame.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by haggie ( 957598 )

      I went to cancel my account yesterday and they gave me 40% off on a renewal, so I'll stick around for another year.

  • 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)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @05:25AM (#63676469)
    Academics search, evaluate, collate, summarise, synthesise, make notes on, etc., published researchers papers for thousands of hours per year & keep track of all that; It's a large part of their job. What do they use? Mostly bibliography managers, e.g. Mendeley (proprietary) or Zotero (FOSS & supported by several academic institutions).

    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.
  • Evernote was great, but they kept making bad decisions. I suspect MBAs and Excel-based decisions was a big part of their decline.
    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

  • 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.

  • I believe we are headed towards another huge culling event like the dot com crash where massively popular websites and webservices will disappear overnight.

    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.

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • I use Evernote extensively, mostly as a virtual filing cabinet. I especially use its clipping-from-the-web feature. Iâ(TM)ve started to use Apple Notes more than I used to, but it doesnâ(TM)t allow you to clip. Iâ(TM)m not sure what else does.

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