To Jamie Hull Evernote VP ?

[absolute0 4]

Hello Jamie,

i was just wondering ....Given the rapid decline in customer satisfaction, do you intend to respond in any way to the specific complaints? Is it your belief that the "design" team's "creative vision" for this product is so advanced that that the users are simply too primitive to understand?

 

The trend away from skeuomorphic design may have merit as a general aesthetic, in order to keep new users engaged, but it makes no sense when the very nature of the product is to mimic/replace an accepted format. Consider that  banks still issue check books not check scrolls. Apple still calls it "iBooks", and Amazon's kindle still markets books, not scrolls. Temporary, and user determined, conversion to a scroll can be useful, iBooks implements the feature, but the page concept conforms to cognitive process. Complex information is not often presented continuously, because even though our devices are capable of it, our brains are not. That's why spreadsheets, charts and discontinuous graphical representations of data are still so widely used.

 

If Evernote is attempting to kill off the Penultimate branded app, for some corporate strategic strategy, then so be it. If that is not the case, then I hope whoever has replaced Jamie will take customer feedback very seriously. That's likely an overly harsh statement, but given that Penultimate was one of the first highly successful apps, and that Evernote is loosing clients/ positive brand perception, the statement is justifiable.

 

Penultimate  and the larger example of Microsoft's windows 8 disastrous debut are indications of a looming  crisis in the industry, continuous product evolution is not practical or desirable. Sheer processing ability will (has) surpassed the needs of the mass market user. I do not claim to know what the solution is, but change for the sake of change is not a viable strategy. 

 

Perhaps simply maintaining market share through incremental improvement is a logical place to start.

 

 

 

 

 

[Philip Young 1]

Agree with you, @absolute0. Judging from numbers of comment from every official releases, nobody cares about this anymore. Everyone already move on from penultimate and won't trust every single brand extension that they created in the future.

 

p.s. It's nice of you to tell them about this issue, but sorry to remind you that they are deaf. 

[habond 0]

Well, that answers my question of whether or not I should purchase a stylus...thanks but no thanks!

[AJC2 2]

To anyone at Evernote/Penultimate:

 

Please explain the business reason about why you refuse to allow your customers to go back to the old version of Penultimate?

 

This makes absolutely no sense.  Your customers are screaming for the change and you're losing customer loyalty (let alone revenue?).

 

We got the note in which you indicated "we screwed up" and you're working on fixing it, but that was months ago and no one thinks the new version comes close to the old one.

 

PS: 'going dark' and being unresponsive isn't great for customer relations either.