[LINK] RIP Printed Evidence of Payments

[Jim Birch]

On 1 November 2013 12:08, Roger Clarke <Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au> wrote:

> But that doesn't appear to be a 'core promise':
> "[Evernote] ... reserve the right to establish limits to ... your
> continued ability to access ... your Content and other data, and
> impose other limitations at any time, with or without notice".
>


Evernote would be crazy to guarantee the continuation of their service to
anyone in perpetuity: technology changes, new scams are invented, and so
on.  Evernote allows a large monthly upload levels, I guess based on the
assumption that people won't hit the limit much and simple pricing sells
better.  If technology or usage changes means that people were hitting the
storage limit or hammering their servers they would have to rethink the
service offer.

Expecting absolutes is a crazy life strategy - a successful relationship
with reality is based on balancing benefits, costs and risks.  The primary
driver for continuation of the Evernote service is not a legal guarantee,
it is that they want to retain and grow a large base of satisfied
customers.  Their product is essentially accessible storage "guearanteed"
by a sustainable business model.    They do have some nice add on features,
eg, the ability to convert scanned handwriting to searchable text with
reasonable accuracy, but easy-to-use low cost storage is their core
business.  AFAIK they don't use your data to profile for advertising
(except of free accounts) so they don't have the incentive to modify their
product to suit third party interests.

A more relevant question would be whether my daughter is better served by
another solution.  There are costs and risks associated with cloud storage,
but are they greater or less than trying to do it yourself?  Plenty of
personally-owned storage systems fail catastrophically, even expensive ones
run by people with ICT skills.  She's a savvy young woman but she doesn't
know a lot about backup technologies, neither should she.  Annual
subscription to Evernote costs less that buying a 1Tb drive and would be
way more reliable, has better features and is easily accessible across
locations and platforms.

- Jim