Slashdot Mirror
Show Me The Money - Microsoft Money Vs. Quicken
prostoalex writes "The weblog entry 'Show me the money' is an interesting tale of Microsoft Money from a developer who now manages software development in the Tablet PC group at Microsoft. Having worked before with Money, which was assigned a task of beating Quicken, Philip describes the disasters that happen when marketing and advertising people rule the software development: 'Money's success or failure was judged using the same metrics as MSN's websites. Metrics like minutes viewed per month. Like ad revenue. Like click-through. Stickiness. I am not making this up.'"
Most people don't use either because their bank/credit card doesn't support them.
The biggest thing I have found useful is online bill pay.
Yay
Sure there are folks who have disperate accounts and complex fincial arrangements where that might make sense, and they're the 1% actually using these products. For everyone else, a decade ago there was a demand because people wanted to keep track of their finances between bank statements. Today you just click online and your bank shows you exactly where your finances are.
As banks try to differentiate themselves in the online marketplace, you can bet they'll expand their offerings until they compete with the offerings from Intuit and Microsoft. Perhaps those firms should stop trying to sell millions of copies to customers and instead try and sell server based software to the banks to produce a customer interface, or are they already doing thatas well?
MS employees are being encouraged to start blogs and engage the /community/ (ie: astroturf on /.) so why would he not last long? He's doing his job.
You're missing the point completely. MS & Quicken both managed to screw up their personal offerings to the point that even regular users still bitch and moan. Please don't send these same developement teams to build the back-end for web apps that people are currently happy with. There's a certain point at which even intelligence can't compensate for complexity.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
As opposed to a bunch of propeller-beanie techies who wouldn't know what a customer wants if he was screaming it in their faces? I've worked on projects where the technologists were in charge, and it's equally ugly. The best result seems to come from collaborative efforts where the marketing types say, "We need X," and the tech heads tell them why it's lame, derivative, and technologically uncool. The two sides squabble for a while, then someone in management threatens both sides with unemployment and it gets done.
Microsoft has never needed a decent marketing team -- they were handed their monopoly on a silver platter by IBM. Since then, their business strategy has had more to do with intimidating OEMs than appealing to customers. Still, I don't think their office ads are as bad or dumb as their choice of a bug as the spokesmodel for MSN! :)
I used to do that.
I've found Gnucash to be vastly superior.
It easily tracks my expenses and account balances.
To do that in a spreadsheet would be more complicated.
No. In a very concise manner, he has described all of Microsoft's problems with Windows and Office, too. This nonsense about customers demanding all of those features that lead to such bloat and leave Microsoft with zero time to actually fix silly things like bugs and security issues has been proven in this blog to be exactly that: nonsense!
Face it; if Microsoft has to compete on anything but a bulleted feature list, they can't!
Cmon.... all of us IN the business knows how this usually works.... salesman goes out, trying to sell a product, the customer asks "Well we need it to do this... can it do this?" "SUURE IT CAN", then they come back and tell us what they just promised them... stupid, insecure, impractical... doesnt matter.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I worked in retail back then. We dealt with a lot of Microsoft products, and I saw their play many times.
First, you find a market with a clear leader. Then, you produce a knock-off, and use marketing to move eyeballs towards your product, convincing the masses that it's superior. (This is the only part that the actual product quality plays. If it sucks so bad that nobody will be fooled into thinking it's superior, then the quality needs to be better.) Finally, if it looks like the market leader will survive, then buy them out; otherwise, drop your price to something minimal and wait it out.
This was played out nowhere as clearly as Quicken. Microsoft made MS Money (which sucked terribly). MS did everything they could to make people see Money. Then they tried to buy Intuit, the makers of Quicken (but Unc' Sam put a stop to that).
Microsoft was clearly dumbfounded. Their three-step plan didn't work. What could they do? MS Money thrashed in agony for a year or two until Microsoft realized they might actually have to put some engineers into improving their product.
Not long after that, I left retail, and knocked the last dust of Microsoft products off my boots. So I don't know what's happened since then; only that every bank I've used supports MS Money downloads.
Most of us watched something similar in the browser wars, but more pronouced. Didja notice that IE was constantly improving lots, right up until IE 4? That's when they started to bundle it with the OS to get eyeballs instead of having to rely on other people who might be able to form opinions of their own. (Actually, the bundling started with IE 3 IIRC, but towards the end of its lifecycle.)
Anyway, when you think of things in those terms, then you want eyeballs. You want people thinking about MS Money as long as possible. That's your only goal. Meeting customer demand is irrelevant, so long as you don't fail by enough to lose eyeballs. And eyeballs are what marketroids know about (well, that and gin).
This entire business strategy is exactly the way for a successful monopoly in one market to expand into other markets. (Leveraging the monopolized markets, like happened with IE, is good too when you can pull it off.) It's terrible for the society, because it mutilates Adam Smith's invisible hand and leaves one finger. But it's good for the share prices.
Why am I suddenly thinking of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation?
Theoretically, in a decent company, competent marketing types figure out what product at what price will generate the most profit. Unfortunately, it seems that finding intelligent marketing folks in corporate America is a real trick. The best marketing most of the professional marketing types accomplish is the marketing to the HR department to get themselves the job.
Another problem is metrics - if bonuses are based on short-term profits/revenue, marketing will be short-sighted, caring more about squeezing every last cent out of the current customer rather than keeping customers for future sales.
Just my opinion, though.
There is a difference between sales and marketing. As you point out, salespeople have to be reigned in and controlled, because they will sell anything. Many software salespeople truly don't understand the limitations of their product, and will try to put a square peg in a round hole if they can get the sale, even if that means shipping an engineer with every unit.
What the article was talking about was a Marketing organization that wasn't thinking straight. There is a profound difference. In this case, Marketing was out of control, not Sales. I have seen this many times. They made one of the most common mistakes that marketing organizations make, namely checklist selling against the competition. This is a no-win situation. First one product is "ahead", then the other, wake me up when you have something new to say.
In order to really make a dent in a market, you have to change the playing field, not just tweak the product. Microsoft is scary/dangerous not because they release new versions of Office occasionally, but because from time to time they do really profound things like boot everyone else out of the Office business by betting on Windows when everyone thought Windows was a non-starter. Remember when Excel used to ship with its own Windows shell, before Windows was available? No? Well, I do. I remember the difference between that early Excel and Lotus, too. Lotus had more checklist features for a long time, but Excel -- it was just plain beautiful and fun to use. Once you used it, you couldn't go back to Lotus, even if it had some bullshit statistical function that Excel didn't have (yet).
Now THAT'S product marketing -- long term perspective, vision, eye on the goal line, pick your cliche of the day.
You know...I know you're right, but I think you're wrong.
:) and sometime utterly useless.
One month ago I had to pass a Marketing exam which basically was about "studying" a couple threehundred pages books on the subject of marketing and answer 50 multiple choice questions.Feh ! I bargained a not satisfactory vote for 3 more months of time wasted into memorizing silly "right answers".
+-80% of the book was well written vapourware with a glassing of rational analysis, but there were some valuable hints in the salesman section.The big point of all the marketing exam was "customer must be satisfied".
Now you say customer feedback is important and I couldn't agree more : after all, the customer is paying so we'd like him to be satisfied and to come back for more. But who's giving the job to the marketeer ? The Company is and according to that M$ guy, M$ was pushing Money as a "portal" to sell advertisement space for advertisers ; in other words the clients were NOT the Money end-users, but the advertisement agents.
So was the marketing team really so shitty ?I don't think so, as they were probably requested to sell Money to ad-agencies and probably concentraded their effort for this purpose, not for the purpose of end-user satisfaction.
This is consistent with the fact that relatively few people actually routinely use Quicken/Money every day, unlike Word. I think M$ choosed not to invest too much geek time on building a superior product and opted to make money on Money by selling ads ; which again is consistant with the end-user financial market, bent on extracting money from the customer rather then helping the customer make more money.
What M$ didn't like is the fact Quicken was and still is taking away customers from this advertising scheme ; marketing isn't to blame if some other company is making a better product, when marketing was asked to sell the product NOT to end user, but to ad-agents.
Btw, marketing is evil
I stopped using GNUcash when they released a new version, and proudly put on their website:
"We don't recommend attempting to update to version x.xx yourself. You should find a distro with it already compiled and upgrade to that."
Why? It was a suggestion! As seeing how this software is used by more inexperienced people, it is a prudent suggestion.
Because do I really want to use an application that is complex that they didnt recommend _anyone_ try to upgrade to it? It had so many dependencies that it was impossible to upgrade! Why should I upgrade my whole friggin OS (Linux.. this is Linux.. not Windows!) to use one crummy app?
'fraid I disagree. I have had quite a few jobs in my life so far, so that means a lot of bosses. As a general rule of thumb, a boss/manager who has actually done the work that his company does, is a better boss. I've had so many examples of both I have a hard time arguing with myself over it. People who enter the workforce strictly as managers have unrealistic expectations, and..well, most of them I have ever met are quite lazy too. Not all, not singling anyone out here, etc, just a general rule of thumb I have noticed anecdotally. Whereas someone who has done the physical sweat and the skull sweat before, actually knows what his employees are talking about. And yes, to go beyond that step requires additional skills, but frankly, I think management skills in general are over hyped. Being a good manager means you are a good person,emphasis good, as in not a dickhead personality wise, you can relate to various situations and people in an even handed and logical manner. To make money at it you just need the additional ability to think a few steps farther and to do long range planning, but the day to day "management" aspect is just being able to keep the humans acting like civised humans, and to be able to understand what people are saying, from any direction.
I know that's only my personal outlook, but it's the one I have now, seeing all the various types of bosses out there, from super hands off minimalists to overbearing dictatroids to know nothing clueless dilettantes. My favorite is a near minimalist who you can talk to, and your input is just as important as the marketing guys input.
From the "marketing is king" side of running business, of course, they say there is no business unless you sell, from the other direction, you make a really good product, then market it, you must have a good product to sell something in the first place. I don't even think crap should be attempted to be sold, to me it's unethical. Mostly because I believe in quality in being job #1 all the time, as a consumer I have overhyped crap being attempted to be sold to me with unethical, but advanced and psychologically studied, peruasion techniques, etc, all the time, it's annoying, rude, crude and counter productive. Makes me think it's a bad company, so that means bad management, from a "management and marketing is king" oriented corporation. It's distateful. Sort of how I feel about the borg for instance, marketing is more important than quality it appears. Hmm, also similar to the current resident at 1600 pennsylvania avenue. Never done a single days work in his life, only been a "manager" and he's done a pretty dismal job so far, IMO. I think that's one of the reasons why, too.
Anyway, we can agree to disagree on it, it won't change a single thing out there one way or the other.
On behalf of everyone who is being held hostage by Intuit's mafia subscription scheme, I am pleading with developers out there to come up with some sort of alternative. MS Money doesn't seem like an acceptable alternative. We need some ethical, unmaniacal finance software. Please please PLEASE! I'm sick of having to pay a few hundred dollars a year to get tax tables for my accounting system that should be freely available. I'm sick of being forced to upgrade my software to keep it running. I'm sick of Quicken collecting private information on my company and my clients. I don't need to route every facet of my financial dealings through some new "feature" that Quicken has foisted upon us. It has to stop - we need alternatives!!
sorry guys, tried moving over to OSS and wasn't satisfied with current state
May I ask which programs you tried & what faults you found with them? GNUCash is really quite good, as are some of the simpler alternatives.