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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.
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.
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?
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!!