Coach Wade

23 hours ago, WeCanLearnAnything said:

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.

Fascinating article. I'd also like to point out that Google, who Evernote hopes to compete with as a cross platform editing suite, is working on a smart car. I find  THIS ARTICLE to also be relevant, particularly this part:

Quote

So that brings the tally to 13 minor fender-benders in more than 1.8 million miles of autonomous and manual driving — and still, not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident.”

 Now, I'm absolutely certain that Evernote's development team has a bug detection sub-team. What I'm not certain of is why nothing appears to ever be done about major bugs in the system. Seriously, I'm not a Mac user, but eight friggin' years to fix the bulleted lists? That is absolutely inexcusable. I don't know, and I don't care what else Evernote was working on during that time. That is a failure so epic that there is no meme suitable even on 4Chan to describe it.

On 6/11/2016 at 1:34 PM, csihilling said:

EN's issue probably has more to do with management, priority and resources than a specific tracking system.  There does not seem to be a concerted effort to fix things (management issue in my view), and hasn't been the years I have been using the product.  Personally, I have never understood why bugs aren't a sin against humanity in the eyes of software companies.

NAILED IT! And this has been my major frustration with Evernote. The individual developers are saints. Management, on the other hand, needs a stern talking to. And by "stern talking to," I mean "Needs to be fired, escorted to the door by security, and have their personal belongings mailed to them."

As a security professional, I will volunteer my services to assist. 

On 6/11/2016 at 6:24 PM, s2sailor said:

Software with any degree of complexity has bugs.  The challenge for any company is to figure the best way to log and prioritize defects and then decide how to use their limited resources on fixing which ones and, or adding new features, if they feel it necessary for business success.  As an example, should resources be focused on fixing some nuisance problem that affects only a few users, or should they instead be focused on developing some new premium feature, such as zero knowledge encryption, that has the potential of adding new paying customers to the service?  How they focus their efforts will be a balancing act that Evernote management will decide.  As others have mentioned, an external tracking or voting system won't help.  Companies that get it right will succeed and those that don't will fade away.

Yes and no. As @WeCanLearnAnything demonstrated, error free programming is eminently possible. And we can't say that "NASA has more resources than Evernote." We don't actually know what resources of its funding NASA commits to software development, but the article she linked to said there were just 276 programmers working on shuttle software in the 1990s. We do know that NASA has been in a funding crisis for the last twenty years, and their computers for most of their equipment are about on a level with an Activision. Heck, they put men on the moon with a slide rule. Up until a few years ago, THEY USED A SINGLE WOMAN TO CHECK THEIR MATH. You've got more computing power in your pocket than was used to land a rover on Mars.

I think a better company to compare Evernote to is Google. Both were modern computer-era startups. Both offer similar features. (Cross platform editing and functionality.) Despite the fact that no feedback to Google is ever acknowledged or apparently listened to, they somehow managed to navigate the treacherous shoals of cross platform computing and be successful. 

I'm a rather bluntspoken person. I've coached and/or taught my entire adult life and published two books on coaching youth sports. I currently teach firearm safety, NRA Basic Pistol, and Concealed Carry Handgun for the State of North Carolina. I'm also a certified Krav Maga instructor who teaches self defense. 

The things I do are often dangerous and potentially life threatening, so let me say that I take a dim view of people saying it's "too hard" to fix bugs in software. In coaching and teaching we have a maxim that is very straightforward: What you tolerate you encourage. I absolutely don't tolerate unsafe actions on the range or in the studio. I didn't tolerate horseplay on my football field or wrestling mat, either. I don't tolerate these things because I refuse to encourage them.

Evernote has bugs because they tolerate having bugs. Evernote has pissed off users because they tolerate having bugs. Evernote has used up the goodwill they developed by having an awesome product that people wanted to use because they tolerate having bugs!

When I first started posting in these forums I was a polite and friendly guy. I was pretty tolerant. Now, not so much, because I am tired of tolerating Evernote's bugs.When I encounter one that has a significant impact to my workflow, I'm going to make sure it's loudly trumpeted here. If it turns out to be something stupid I'm doing, I'm certain other users will happily point out my blunders, and I will accept that because, hey, I fouled up.

If it's an Evernote problem, they will fix it, listen to my voice get louder and louder, or kick me out of the forums and forever lose me as a potential paying customer. They really have those three options, because I have done runned out of tolerance.

On 6/11/2016 at 3:17 PM, Bob in NV said:

Of course how you prioritize isn't easy to decide. For instance, for me, the failure to give users a way to enlarge the fonts used on iOS is a deal breaker, and I no longer use Evernote for taking notes, and see no need to be a subscriber. How this isn't viewed as a high priority bug that effects lots of users - who have complained about it for years - I don't know. But I assume it is because the developers just don't see it as an issue. Not enough user interest, or it is too complicated to fix easily, who knows. Or maybe the shear number of other high priority complaints have pushed fonts to the bottom of the priority list.

When the core features of a product are not functioning properly, such as bulleted lists and cross-platform editing that does not introduce errors into the text (Like the space stripping bug that took literally five years to fix), one must call into question the priorities of a company that focuses on releasing new features instead of fixing that functionality. 

Fonts are, in fact, the core feature of a RTF editor. If you can't manipulate text and choose fonts, styles, and sizes, then you might as well be running emacs on a 286. Why the heck would you pay for an editor that can't do these basic features? THERE ARE 422,000 HITS ON "ANDROID TEXT EDITORS" UNDER "APPS." Evernote is competing with all of them. I assume there are a similar number of iOs apps. 

I,too, was a subscriber with a paid Evernote account. I canceled it when I realized the space stripping bug wasn't getting fixed. Why would I pay for a product that doesn't work, especially when the management indicates that their priority is useless non-core features rather than fixing the broken stuff? Seriously, I keep asking, but to date not one single person has come forward to tell me they actually use work chat!  Why was it the focus of Evernote's development for years instead of bug fixes?

Seems to me that nearly everyone who runs Evernote uses text editing. Kinda think that making that work right should be the biggest and most important priority of the management team.

Let me close with this: I am both Evernote's harshest critic and biggest fan! As I have mentioned several times, the easiest thing for me to do is walk away. I have chosen, actively made an informed decision, to continue using Evernote. That means my continued presence here doing what I can to make things better. Anyone can bytch. Anyone can complain. I try to make my complaints constructive, even if cranky. Ultimately, I want Evernote to succeed.

On 6/2/2016 at 7:42 PM, akaHomerJay said:

@RobertJSawyer Thanks, this solution works decently enough to ease the sting of shades of white evernote is forcing on use : / 

(I'm on version 6.1.2.2292 public, FYI). 

/Begin Rant/ I really wish the people in charge of the developers would listen to reason though.  WHY are they forcing users into this UGLY interface? I'm certain that given the choice, nobody would choose the new "design" over the original, more colorful design. Microsoft is doing the same with their stupid color schemes in office 2013+. What's wrong with all these people making design decisions? And why haven't they all been fired? /End Rant/

Intriguingly, the same woman that was responsible for the MS Office 2010 "Ribbon" fiasco was also the one who arbitrarily decided that Windows 8 didn't need a Start menu. She has since been relegated to "Chief Design Officer," a position with no actual authority or oversight.

It seems that almost all companies have a problem understanding that users are not interested in having our workflow disrupted. We don't want layout changes. We don't want menus to move. We don't want "more efficiency." We're already using the product because it makes us efficient! If it didn't, we'd find another product. 

It seems common sense to me that if you're going to change the design of a product to such a degree that it alters the user's workflow, what you're essentially doing is asking the user to learn a new product. As a user, if you're going to force me to learn a new product, why are you assuming that it will be YOUR product and not an entirely different one?!

For example, for years I used a particular video editing software. When they changed from a linear, storyboard, format to a non-linear pageview format, I simply stopped using them and bought another software. (They were demanding users pay for this upgrade, anyway.) 

On 5/28/2016 at 2:03 AM, gggirlgeek said:

Thank you! Dear God, Thank you!

I have tried messing with this for YEARS, and I've tried every possible solution, but nothing worked.  Why won't the developers help us out with this if it's so simple????

 

Because they're too busy not fixing bugs and rolling out useless junk like Work Chat. 

1 minute ago, JMichaelTX said:

Just to be clear, the "Guru" label means absolutely nothing.  It is NOT something any of us picked.  It is a stupid label automatically assigned by this forum's software to ANY user who has about 300 posts or more.

Good to know. Thank you. I assume when I reach 300+ complaints, I'll be a guru, too.

Okay. I hear you, Gustav. Please accept my apologies for my tone, then. 

I am so aggravated by Evernote's total lack of customer focus and absolutely asinine refusal to fix known problems in favor of rolling out useless, unwanted, or downright STUPID features that it's making me snarky. That probably has something to do also with the fact that I finally had four hours to actually WRITE today... and I spent THREE of them dicking around with bugs that should have been fixed weeks/months/years ago.

You're not the problem. Evernote is. And Evernote needs to look very closely at their toilet paper, because it's not clean, and users are getting sick of it.

On 5/23/2016 at 3:49 PM, gustavgi said:

Sure those are some of the annoying bugs that keep showing up, but it's not what makes/breaks a multi million dollar company.

Your strategy would though. EN has never been under more pressure with Apple Notes and Dropbox Paper etc. Marketing and new features are essential to the company staying relevant in the near future. Sure, there is no need for new features that tries to make EN something it's not, like what's been done in the recent past, but it needs new core-product features.

If I were EN i would invest heavily in AI and functions which would make everyone's EN experience more personlized. Maybe something similar to "Google on Tap" but for your EN content etc.

Even though I'm sceptical of the Context feature when it comes to external sources, the Context function of showing my own related notes was a step in the right direction. However it needs to be more easily accessable from anything and everywhere. Now it's just "hidden" at the bottom of a note..

And you should be careful with using other people's names, even if it's just as a hypotical example..

You could not be more wrong. That is EXACTLY what breaks a company of ANY size. It's called IGNORING YOUR CUSTOMERS. 

Ever hear of a tiny little multi-million dollar company called Circuit City? Fascinating corporation. Died in four years after their CEO decided in 2008 to start laying off their front-end customer support folks and customer service vanished more or less overnight. 

Evernote is NOT TRUSTWORTHY. Period. It CANNOT BE TRUSTED. They have the same sense of customer focus as a blocked nostril. The development supervisors are IDIOTS. 

It can't keep formatting. It installs UNWANTED and UNNECESSARY executable files on your computer. The BASIC FUNCTIONS OF A TEXT EDITOR, such as linewrap, cut/paste, and even friggin' BACKSPACE work randomly or not at all. 

These forums are full of YEARS of complaining customers. Last year this thread began with an Evernote employee telling a baldfaced LIE that they "listen to customers." I call BS. Evernote doesn't listen, has never listened, and with a track record like that it is obvious that they WILL NEVER LISTEN to their customers. 

If anyone wants to try to claim that they DO listen, then why did it take them FIVE YEARS  to fix the bug that was stripping spaces out of notes and jamming texttogether likethis? At one point there were TWELVE DIFFERENT THREADS complaining about that bug, and it was first reported in November of 2010 and not fixed until SEPTEMBER... of 2015! I started THREE of those threads MYSELF in 2012, 2014, and 2015!

Yeah, you sure listened well. That's why you rolled out that stupid work chat that literally NO ONE who is not in the Evernote employ actually uses. That's why you have to use obnoxious popup advertising of your "new features" over the top of the client workflow. That's EXACTLY what customer service is.

Let me be blunt because I'm sick of this, Gustavgi. I'm not interested in a flame war with you, but if all you want to do is bend a knee to a company that can't get out of their own way because they confuse innovation with actual working products, then I don't care even a little bit what you have to say. In fact, let me be even more blunt: 

If you are not an Evernote employee, I am NOT interested in ANYTHING you have to say in reply to this message. That goes for all "gurus" and fanboys and white knights who feel it necessary to defend the noble honor of this software company. 

If you ARE an Evernote employee, I'd be happy to talk to you. I'll even be polite, but I strongly doubt you're going to want to hear what I have to say.

WeCanLearnAnything is absolutely correct. Evernote has NO BUSINESS rolling out a single new feature, changing a single color, redesigning a single button, or moving a single f*ing menu until the stuff they already have ACTUALLY WORKS!

Evernote wants desperately to be business class software. You cannot even ACCURATELY PRINT OUT A GROCERY LIST with their flagship product. 

I'll be perfectly clear: the ONLY reason I'm still here is that I've written 250,000 words in Evernote and I don't really want to not only change my writing system, but have to transfer all that to some other software just because the main software I use is developed by morons.

I don't even know why Evernote HAS customer forums. It's not like they listen to a frickin' thing that has EVER been posted in them.