New Evernote CEO Vows To Spend 2019 Fixing Note-Taking App's Long List of Problems (venturebeat.com)

Rather than serving up platitudes about innovation, the man charged with saving former unicorn Evernote says his priority this year is addressing the long list of user complaints. From a report: Despite some progress, Evernote continued to struggle last year, cutting 15 percent of its staff and losing many top executives.So what doesn't work? Lots of stuff, much of it very basic, new CEO Ian Small says: "Frankly, it's a bit disingenuous for me to try to get our most dedicated users all fired up about inventing the future of Evernote when exactly those same people are the ones who know best that sync doesn't always work right. Or that Evernote on Windows is a bit tired, and is missing features that are found on the Mac version. Or that each version of Evernote seems to work slightly differently, and exhibits its own unique collection of bugs and undesirable behaviors. Or that Evernote on mobile devices sometimes feels like a pared-down version of a powerful desktop app, instead of a mobile-first view into a powerful cloud-enabled productivity environment." Small says these problems have lingered for years and were well-known, but he didn't want to get into why they weren't fixed sooner. Instead, he promises the main focus of 2019 will be dealing with these and numerous other issues.

Comments

lolwtf?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

How does a company that makes a note taking app need hundreds of people? *head asplodes*

Re:lolwtf?!?

[arglebargle_xiv]

A team for backend, frontend, Android and iPhone, devops, and then sales, accounting, HR, and managers.

Also Andrew, the guy who does all the programming. The first Evernote updates will start appearing when he gets back from holiday next week.

Re:lolwtf?!?

[terrycarlino]

Like many problems with corporate America its an Wall Street problem.

Evernote is a progam that does one thing really well. It lets you keep a list of things in the cloud so you can access it from all your devices, no matter what their operating system. I access my Evernote account from Linux, Windows, Android and could access it from iOS and whatever OS Apple computers are now using. It works great and does everything I expect.

The problem is that only so many people need this functionality. There is no reason to expect that such a company will continue to exhibit huge growth past a few years. That shouldn't matter. As long as there is no customer base contraction the company once its completes it's initial application development on the various platforms should only need a staff large enough to keep the applications update for changes and updates in the various OS's and to maintain the cloud based servers that the information lives on. Like any other utility it should make a tidy profit each year, and if well run pay it's stockholders a reasonable dividend.

But of course that isn't what Wall Street wants. They want a company with an increasing stock value that allows them to buy it low, sell it high and roll over the profit to the next sale. They justify this differential price rise by pointing to an impossibly ever increasing customer base, increasing profits, etc.

It's time for Wall Street to wake up to the realities of sustainable market forces. Companies which make a steady profit, provide a dividend and coincidentally actually provide a useful service, so have a reason to exist beyond marketing and stock manipulation.

That means Evernote needs to determine what size staff it actually needs to maintain its user base and decide if that number is economically sustainable at the prices it charges its users. If it does it shouldn't matter if its stocks are surging, as long as they are properly valued.

That's what happens

[phantomfive]

That's what happens when you only fix the p1 and p2 bugs and let the other ones sit in your bug tracker forever. Eventually the "little annoyances" grow up and are overwhelming.

Re:That's what happens

[Krishnoid]

90% of the bugs are the p1 and p2 bugs and are budgeted to take 90% of the time. The other 10% of the bugs are the little annoyances, and basic math describes how long that ends up taking.

Finally! I hope they actually do...

[azcoyote]

I've used Evernote for years as part of my academic research, and I have hovered between paying for it and ditching it altogether. Every time I look into the premium version, it's clear that it's a boatload of money for features I will never use. On top of that, the "UX" gets worse and worse and it becomes less and less of a productive program, for example as they keep hiding the actual notebooks deeper behind buttons and menus. Sometimes, then, I think about jumping ship and switching everything over to OneNote, but it's hard to trust Microsoft with much of anything, and OneNote has lost data for me before.

Re:Finally! I hope they actually do...

[Wraithlyn]

When Evernote started charging money to run the native app on more than 2 devices, I immediately switched to SimpleNote and have never looked back.

It lacks the fancy rich-text & media stuff that Evenote has, but for plain text (which is all I want) it's perfect. Uses tags for organizing notes, which I actually prefer over notebooks.

I too find OneNote flaky...

[SuperKendall]

OneNote I used on an iPad and my desktop for a while, for a client.

However one day, it just started crashing on the iPad, on login. Reinstall - still crash. Wait a month for an update or two, still crashes...

I gave up at that point. I now use Notes.app for most things, I can have shared lists with my wife very easily, and It syncs well enough between desktop and other devices. It has just enough features...

I had looked at Evernote and even used it for a time, but it was too bulky for most of what I needed.

Maybe they should listen to the users...

[SvnLyrBrto]

If you check their support forums, people had been begging for a "dark mode" setting literally for most of a decade. Users requested it over and over and over, and even came up with hacky workarounds to approximate it. Evernote would occasionally post some "we take feature requests seriously" platitude. But they refused this most simple request. I'd actually given up for quite a while and was using Sublime Text to take notes. Unfortunately, there's no iPhone app for Sublime to sync to; and I found myself in need of multiple-device solution so I had to go back. Even after Apple themselves finally forced the issue by creating a system-wide dark mode; Evernote dragged their heels for months, continuing to blast that awful bright white rectangle in our faces. Why? Who the hell knows? Some asshat at EN just decided that their personal preference should trump those of their users; eyestrain be damned.

Plus, they refuse to fix even the most simple bugs. Lately, I've had to fight with the damn thing to keep my plain text notes (With code snippets that get borked by bullshit unicode garbage characters like "smart" quotes, emdashes, and ellipses.) in plain text mode. I'll frequently add to an old note and lo-and-behold; Evernote switches back to "rich" text and Helvetica and "smart" formatting; no matter how many times I try to kill all that crap. Bug reports and support requests? Ignored.

The stink of it is, for what it is, Evernote is still unfortunately the best solution... hell... the only decent solution, really. But as arrogant and unresponsive as the company is; they're a prime target for some startup to come and do it better. I, for one, will not likely weep a single tear when they fall to their own hubris.

Compromises had to be made

[Drunkulus]

You have to consider the resources required to operate a hipster-compliant infrastructure. Everything has to be in the cloud, everything has to be chopped into microservices and run in Docker (if you don't understand why, this can never be explained to you... just like Minecraft). Evernote cannot simply yum install mysql and be done with it. Listen... our man-bun coiffed lumberjack dressed team arrives at work on electric scooters carrying artisanal farm-to-table kale scones wrapped in unbleached fair trade waxed bakery tissue. Does this sound like the type of group that would do anything practical? Of course not! Therefore we will expend sprint after sprint retrofitting MongoDB to approximate the feature set of Google Sheets. Once that's done maybe we'll boot up our pirated copy of Windows Vista and look at those old bugs.

Re:Dead

[Voyager529]

Note taking is one area where "mobile first" is a good idea. The best note taking device is the one you have with you. And most of the times, it is a mobile device.

And unfortunately, most note taking apps are terrible on mobile. In particular, the only app I know does hand drawing correctly is Squid/Papyrus, but it is the only thing it does well. Mobile phones take pictures, have a touchscreen you can draw on, but they are terrible for text input, and yet, most mobile note taking apps rely on the latter.

Still, "mobile-first view into a powerful cloud-enabled productivity environment" doesn't sound good. The problem is data entry, not the "view", the "cloud" or the "productivity environment".

I half agree with this, but I think you're missing the GP's point. I agree that making it easy to jot down notes and get the information out of one's brain and onto a more permanent form of storage is something mobile devices are good at, and I agree that the mobile versions of most note taking apps could stand to use a bit of improvement.

However, what I think was the original point, is that while mobile devices are great for taking notes due to their availability, desktops are great at helping to categorize that data based on their ability to show lots more data at once, and alter the display of that data to allow for greater amounts of categorization.. In the broadest of strokes, the most optimal system would be one where the mobile UI is optimized for data entry and the desktop UI is optimized for metadata entry (e.g. tags, categories, pages, links, consolidation, OCR, and so on).

The problem is that giving each platform a means to utilize its strengths is incredibly difficult to do; such a task would land the product in one of three categories:

1. The low-density, few-controls "mobile first" UI that wastes massive amounts of space on a 24" monitor and has so few controls as to lack the ability for users to customize.
2. A high-density, highly-customizable UI on a mobile device that's impossible to navigate or pick particular controls, or ending up with multiple sub-menus that make the mobile version unfriendly to use.
3. A schizophrenic UI that is optimized for both, but ends up being foreign to the end user when they switch between platforms, making it seem like almost two different products.

Good UI design is hard, and the unicorn, 'just right' UI, if it ever is properly conceived, is undoubtedly going to die on the table of the first committee meeting.