WeCanLearnAnything

In an earlier post, I shared my "dream" announcement from Evernote, an announcement that would say they were going to fix bugs rather than add new features. Instead, the new announcement is massive price hikes and a 2-device limit, the latter of which appears to break every promise and message of Evernote marketing for years. Not a single specific improvement was offered to justify these changes. In other words, the only thing we know for sure is that Evernote's Basic plan is getting dramatically worse. Perhaps in this thread someone can mention improvements to the note editor that justify these changes?

This article is inspirational... and it's from the nineties! Every company of every type should have a team whose sole mission is to find flaws.

I can't say I know a lot about software design. I can say this, though: If some bugs will never be fixed, Evernote ought to ensure that every user knows what those bugs are before committing much time or data to Evernote. Among the bugs discussed repeatedly in the forums over the years, can you name the ones that should never be fixed? It seems to me that the recurring threads are all about basic features (font size, copy/paste, bullet list alignment, etc.) and those should work, shouldn't they?

What kind of internal tracking system would allow the same bugs to exist for 7+ years? (If you search, you will find many of the same bugs being discussed in posts from 2008. The threads are eerily similar.) Users could vote for most important bugs to fix. Jim and Mary could report on the difficulties they have fixing their bugs and open up a thread for each bug. If one takes longer than another, that's fine. At least we'd know the name of the person trying to fix it and what they trying. As for nothing positive happening from a public list, I think it is the privacy of their list (or whatever tracking system they use) that's the real problem. A private note discussing a 7-year-old bug is bad, but quiet. If an official public list acknowledged that no employee was even trying to fix a 7-year-old bug, that would be mega embarrassing and would spur a lot of positive action. Maybe they'd finally focus on fixing things rather than adding new features. A more general response: Can you imagine a slower way of handling bugs than what Evernote does now? How many 3, 5, or 8+ year-old bugs remain unfixed?

If Evernote users want to vote on bug fix importance, that's fine. As for the DRI, the OP says that they have "... created a dedicated team focused on improving the note editor..." so DRIs would be selected among them since fixing the editor is already their job.

Can I make a suggestion to Evernote employees about bug fixes? For the sake of transparency, make a list of all bugs that team is aware of and post progress in this forum. You could track all the bug fixing in something like the picture below. Lastly, you could implement a simple but strictly enforced rule: If any DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) has any unfixed bugs over 12 months old, then he/she spends 100% of their working hours on fixing that bug until it is fixed. Thoughts?

I just edited the post to make it clearer that the letter is fiction.

Again, I may not be a representative user and I get that. The main reason I'm thinking of switching from Evernote to OneNote or DropBox Paper (or some other competitor) is because I expect those competing products to just work. I do not expect Evernote's products to just work. There are way too many glitches that, as you say, just keep showing up. DropBox, on the other hand, has worked flawlessly for me for years now, so I trust their software a lot more than I trust Evernote. *EDIT*. Question @ Gustavgi and anyone else, including Evernote employees. Many of us are aware of "... some of the annoying bugs that keep showing up...". Please complete this sentence. Evernote users should endure those bugs for ______ years while employees add new features. If the brakes in a car glitch out a lot and the car's integration with Siri isn't working, fix the brakes first and fix Siri afterwards.

For the record, I use Evernote all the time and it has greatly improved my life. That being said, I may be an extreme case, but here is The Evernote Announcement I'd Love to Hear Dear Evernote Users, For the rest of 2016 and 2017, we will be introducing no new front-end features at all. There will be no new buttons, no new menus, no new interfaces, no new colors, nothing new at all. We will be launching no new products, no new services, no new marketing campaigns, no new branding, no new pricing, nothing of the sort. We are putting all new front-end ideas and feature requests on hold. Instead, from now until 2018, ALL developers will spend ALL of their time: Deleting underutilized features and Making the remaining features just work. Think bulletproof. Think zero glitches. Think flawless back-end, too. We're going to eliminate copy/paste weirdness. In tables, the up key will move the cursor - you guessed it - up! And the down key will move the cursor - you guessed it - down! Fonts will be predictable and will not randomly switch to the magical (and otherwise unobtainable) size of 13 (link 1, link 2). Print preview and printing will prove worthy of shopping lists (i.e. they won't randomly crop out tiny slices of text while misaligning lists). URLs that Evernote generates will work right away. We won't make you figure out how to eliminate the double-icon in your taskbar. That's just the beginning; a lot of great things will happen behind the scenes, too. And when the software works, we'll have earned your trust, and you'll know you can trust Evernote for your life's work, to remember everything, as a digital extension of your brain. Nothing is going to distract us. Nothing is going to stop us. We're going to make Evernote just work. Chris O'Neill [as imagined by an Evernote user] CEO, Evernote FYI, the glitches mentioned here are ones with which I've become familiar in the past few months. I bet there are a lot of other ones, too. And although there are new features I'd love to see (namely adding text boxes to ink notes), it's probably better to make old stuff work than it is to make new things. Thoughts?