Reference Manager 11 Update – Still Doesn’t Work; Do Not Buy!

I spent half a day on the phone with Reference Manager’s help people who had me try everything they could think of. They couldn’t figure out what was going on so they just kept having me try things — most of which I had already tried on my own.

The last guy said he would take this to the team meeting and get back to me — and never did. [When are customer service operations going to learn that the deafening silence with which they follow up on their "promises" to customers is even more annoying than the initial problem? I would expect a follow-up, an apology for their inability to solve the problem, and an offer of a refund.]

So now I’m trying to get my money back, since this whole exercise in upgrading has been a pointless waste of time. The money is minor compard to the time I’ve spent on this — but damned if I’m going to let them just shrug their shoulders and give up without so much as an apology.

The moral: DO NOT upgrade RM10 to RM11 — the improvement was going to be minor, and it has turned into a pointless time sink.

UPDATE 2/24/08: I spent 2 hours on the phone with their most experienced tech support person and he can’t get it to work, either. He has no control over refunds, but told me to tell Sales that I worked with him. Sales says return it to Amazon — but of course Amazon won’t take back used software. In short, software companies don’t seem to have to stand behind their product. You buy it, you’ve got it. And, since this company Thomson Scientific has bought out the major competitors — EndNote and ProCite — they have monopoly power and I can’t take my business to the competition.

It’s not the money, it’s the idiocy of it — they’ve spent probably 5 hours on the phone with me, worth much more than the $100 the software cost. Not to mention the value of my time. (Yes, I should have bailed on this long ago, but it’s the classic debugging problem — let’s try ONE MORE thing.)

What Do “Regular” People Do? Technology Frustrations

Why is it that computer technology manufacturers get away with a level of incompetence and callousness that we would not tolerate from other participants in the marketplace? The only answer I can think of is that they ALL do it. Which means it’s easy for someone to have a competitive edge: be usable!

[Yes, I'm thinking about switching to Mac. I have so much invested in hardware, software, and especially in learning how to do things in Windows...But...If switching means not having these problems...]

I currently have open trouble tickets with 3 different hard/software manufacturers:

• I upgraded Reference Manager fro 10 to 11 and now a crucial function doesn’t work
• I upgraded Atlas ti from 5 to 5.2+ and it failed completely. After much back and forth, including several uninstalls/reinstalls, they sent me a file that seems to have solved the problem. I’m waiting to see if it keeps working.
  • Tech support chided me for not installing the additional updates — but when I installed the first update it failed completely, barring me from further upgrades.
  • My Netgear wifi router, which I bought in October and which worked for a while, has more or less failed. The signal strength, even with my laptop literally right next to the router, shows 2 out or 5 bars, and neither laptop nor cellphone can connect to it (so it’s not the laptop that’s failing, it’s the router).
    • To get tech support from Netgear, I had to register the device. Several times, I put in the serial # and it told me that the number was a dupe (had I already registered it?), but it didn’t recognize any of my three email addresses (so no, I wasn’t in the system). I had to put in several variations on the serial #, capitalizing the letters and alternating between zeros and ohs, and with and without the asterisk at the end of the number. Now I’m not sure which combination of these finally worked. Same thing happened with the password they sent me. How hard can it be to create unambiguous serial numbers and passwords?
    • Ironically, the form that asked me how hard the device was to install offered a dropdown list of several 4 digit numbers — something like 1046, 1047, and 1048. So their usability questionnaire was unusable.

  And I’m actually more technically able than most of my friends and relatives outside of the iSchool. And I have built-in tech support from the iSchool staff and our students. I can’t imagine what most of my friends would do with this level of failure.

  As it is, I’ve spent much of my time over break troubleshooting and working around these problems. I suspect I’ve spent almost as much time on the technical problems as on the work this technology is supposed to support: analyzing my data (Atlas ti) and writing several articles (Ref Mgr).

  And that’s not counting the effort that went into connecting a new 2nd monitor — which worked, but it took a while to get the resolution right. At least I knew that the problem was the resolution — again, what would someone with no tech skills do when they brought home a new monitor and found the image was wonky? Again, I’m not that technically sophisticated, but more so than most of my non-iSchool friends.

  As long as there continue to be such usability problems with hardware and software — including those as completely pointless and unnecessary as the serial number problem — computer technology will come nowhere near the level of adoption that it could have. Not to mention the amount of annoyance and frustration that it generates.

Software Failures – Never Update Working Software!

My new rule: if it’s running, don’t update it!

If you are running Atlas ti, do not, do not, DO NOT update it to 5.2. It has failed on both my machines (home desktop and home laptop) and the fix that tech support sent doesn’t work. SoI’m trying to finish two articles over the break using my Atlas ti coding and I can’t get into my data.

Similarly, if you are running Reference Manager, DO NOT update from 10 to 11. It only works partially, and exactly the update that I wanted (to no longer have to key in over again the text to search on when inserting refs into an article, e.g., the author’s name) — that’s exactly what doesn’t work, and it broke the entire function. So I CAN’T key in the name and search on it from within a document. I have to leave the document, go to RM, find the reference, select it, and go back to the document to insert it. Again, tech support has been unable to fix this.

So time that I should be spending on my research is being wasted trying to fix broken software.