Tag: notes

Evernote Has Me Deeply Concerned

Carl Setzer

I’m a heavy user of Evernote. I love the product, as much as I love anything. It does a pretty great job with my notetaking needs. There are some recurring bugs that annoy the hell out of me, but that’s true with pretty much all software.

Then there’s the business. Evernote looks to be in significant trouble. I know so many people who were really annoyed at Evernote’s rebranding initiative. Especially since it appeared that that work came at the expense of feature upgrades. 

However, even bigger: their CTO, CFO, CPO and Head of HR all have stepped down. That sends a powerful message. Even it’s a random string of happenstance, it’s hard to accept that. The video below summed the situation, and my concerns, up as of a few days ago. 

Now, today, Boing Boing writes that Evernote announced layoffs. The compound effect of all this gives me deep concern. I’ve started exploring the other alternatives. Steve Dotto had talked about Notion, which I’ve started messing with. There’s a bunch of things I like about it, but have only started that exploration. 

I’m not ready to fully abandon them yet. However, I also have no interest in getting caught off-guard by the failing of a product I depend on. I’ve been bit by this before. 

Paper vs Digital Notes and Vanishing Information

Carl Setzer

Today I was thinking today about the past. I worked on at project, in the mid-nineties, for Amazon. They were located in a single building in downtown Seattle, very close to Pike Place Market. Nothing to dramatic, just installed terminals in a new call center. I had fun. My main memory: a guy brought his Corgi to work every day. About once an hour, a ball would be thrown down the hall and the dog would tear after it. For me, that exemplified the kind of place I wanted to work.

Anyway, I was wondering what I could pull together from that. Who did I work with? For? Was I there for a week? A month?

All that info? Gone. Yeah, that was quite some time ago. But I’m a rather meticulous note-taker, so am a bit bothered by the information being simply gone.

Now, that was pre-digital anything, really. Ok, the world wide web was a thing (duh, Amazon), but I didn’t own a cellphone yet. There wasn’t a smartphone of any stripe (it would be several years before Handspring would launch the Treo). So, yeah…gone.

Much is made about the fragility of digital record keeping. But there’s fragility to paper, too. Sure, these notes may still exist in some box in my garage. But, most likely, they were tossed out, left somewhere, or… There’s no such thing as backing up paper “stuff”.

When I think about using tools like Evernote, Gmail and all the grand life in the Cloud, I’m struck by a key thing: syncing. My digital information is available cross-platform, cross-device, cross-everything. It’s easy to share (and, yeah, subpoena). Which, to me, sells digital over paper.

Now, I do have paper notes, and journals and notes and…I just need to remember to scan them in, just for a backup. Because, who knows, in twenty years, I might really be interested in where I was today.