While this post must be pretty distressing for the Evernote team, their response time is pretty impressive! Within a couple hours of this post being published, Phil Libin has already contacted him. See the edit at the end of the post:
"Update: Evernote CEO Phil Libin contacted me and we spoke about the issues described. He apologized, saying the post rings true and that there is a lot of work to be done both on the application and service fronts — and that he hopes my impression will be reversed a few months from now."
Hi, OP here. It was very gracious of him, but I should note that I've met Phil several times over the years (including while I was formerly a TechCrunch reporter), which I suspect had something to do with the speed.
Impressive in some sense, but also rather disturbing when the CEO of Evernote admits that the product basically doesn't work.
I've always found Evernote to be clunky, so I don't use it, and now I know it's buggy as hell and loses (by admission of their CEO) and I feel good about my decision to push people away from Evernote.
I found it rather reassuring. I was expecting a simple "sorry, here's a small freebie to make you happy" but the CEO recognizing the problems is exactly how to make me think they might actually fix them soonish.
I understand your feeling. On the other hand, what we get a lot of in this industry (every industry, actually) is a CEO who will not admit that the product has problems, even though it clearly does. So I'm encouraged. Although I will also probably be migrating my data out of Evernote this weekend. But I'll keep an eye on it, and perhaps get back into it later if they improve and I haven't come up with something better in the meantime.
Another paying anxious victim here. I'm anxious to the point that I've kept a separate copy of notes I add to evernote on my local machine as well. Recently, I've limited myself to using it as a glorified bookmarker and am questioning my own sanity in paying for a service like evernote.
The kind of response you're talking about is not enough. This kind of speed of response in addressing the issue must have been given when the OP filed the report, not only when he decided to go public with it.
Given that the technology required for evernote isn't advanced or cutting edge or experimental researchy stuff, I find the bug rate appalling.
That's because it's PR triage rather than actually addressing the issue. It shows they are listening and care about their image, which is good, but not much more.
"Update: Evernote CEO Phil Libin contacted me and we spoke about the issues described. He apologized, saying the post rings true and that there is a lot of work to be done both on the application and service fronts — and that he hopes my impression will be reversed a few months from now."