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Coach Wade

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Everything posted by Coach Wade

  1. 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: 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. 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. 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. 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.
  2. 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.)
  3. Because they're too busy not fixing bugs and rolling out useless junk like Work Chat.
  4. I think it's time you use your admin powers for good. I'm not interested in a flame war with DTLow, but I'm not suffering any more of his ***** with a smile. He's been reported twice and ignored. This is now the third time, and I'm sick of him.

    I will continue to post negative comments regarding Evernote policies and procedures that do not meet my expectations as a customer. If he finds it necessary to label my posts "rants" "tantrums" or whatever, I will continue to tell him to shut up. I neither want nor need his commentary. 

    I'm trying to be polite, but clearly my first two reports were too respectful. 

  5. Good to know. Thank you. I assume when I reach 300+ complaints, I'll be a guru, too.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
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