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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.'"
This just adds credence to a problem that Microsoft seems to be suffering from. The Marketing and Advertising divisions of Microsoft dictate the direction of the company. Sure, there needs to be some work done with their code-monkeys to stop these exploits from even being created in the first place, but maybe the programmer's jobs would be easier if they did not have to perform on a tight deadline created by those who have nothing to do with the products' creation. A shame too, considering that not all MS software is crap. I'm not an apologist, I'm just not afraid to admit that it's not entirely the fault of the coders that they have working for them.
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From what I know, Microsoft money is a standalone application for Windows. How, then would they measure minutes viewed, click-through, etc unless they secretly transfer these statistics when the computer is online?
I went to the Microsoft Money (TM) website, and they don't seem to have a web-based or online version of it, in which context these stats would make sense.
Does M$ track and report the amount of time each application was in use on a PC? Sounds improbable, but with a TFH on, it's hard to say.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
OMG the author mentions Telemate! I've forgotten all about it. Well, not really forgotten it, only forgot its name (the name Terminate, from its l33t competitor hangs in my mind for some reason).
Telemate was the ULTIMATE BBS terminal application! It did all sorts of funky protocols (like Z-modem with resumed downloads), it did chained downloads with correctly guesstimated time-left for current/all file(s), you could use plugins (like one plugin that let you see JPGs when downloading so you could easily cancel the ghey ones before having completed them) it was multi-threaded, had cool text-based windows, scripts, it was totally the bomb!
*snif* finally a Microsoft employee brings a tear to my eye for something else than excruciating frustration..
Excuse me while I wallow in nostalgia..
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Long Answer: Read Below
Those of us whom accountants might say have even somewhat complicated tax returns require a program to help categorize and summarize all of the various transactions. Now my Bank doesn't have enough information to do that... and they don't need it either (*dons tinfoil hat*)... and if they did I would find another bank (*removes tinfoil hat*).
I run Quicken all year long and when tax time comes around it's a matter of running the right reports and taking the results and putting them in the various schedules. Even the IRS is often satisfied with the reports generated by Quicken, though they may ask for actual receipts and such during the audit.
The point being that Quicken (sorry guys, tried moving over to OSS and wasn't satisfied with current state) gives me detailed Tax related categorization and summarization that my bank statement (online banking service) doesn't.
I
...even with those type of metrics vs. real software quality metrics Microsoft Money is a superior quality product compared to Quicken.
Don't even get me started on the lack of a 'real' money management software package on Mac OS. Quicken is a joke.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Quicken has much better set-up, more support, and a more professional look. Money has the ONE "killer" feature for me. It can show a chart, based on your bills and paychecks you enter in, showing how much money is in an account.
I use this to look at my checking account, and make sure that my lowest point of money each month remains at a certain level. Its very obvious weeks in advance if your checking account is going to drop below the minimum balance, etc.
I used quicken for a few days and couldn't find this feature, so I went back to Money.
"As banks produce better and better online banking systems, is there still a place for Money / Quicken?"
.NET was you could connect to all kinds of old systems (read: bank mainframes) and put up a web presence. Think how often you've seen ASP pages on bank account sites. The blog author hit the nail on the head with Intuit: they don't care about banks. Instead, they're making a ton of money through tax software/sites and the like (cold hard cash on every tax filing). Quicken, at this point, is just a shuttle to their tax software/sites.
Yes. You've got to remember the difference in goals. Banks want you to stick money in their vaults and keep it there. They also want you to take out high-interest loans. Basically, they don't want you leaving the bank.
Money/Quicken, on the other hand, have become competition-laden marketing tools. Each touts loan offers and banks from a gazillion vendors. The more they fight, the more MS and Intuit win. They don't lose a red cent from sponsoring banks battling each other into oblivion, whereas your local bank will do anything on their website to avoid competition.
"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?"
Yes. Actually, more MS has. One of the selling features of
I forgot about the reports that Money and Quicken produce. My bank at least doesn't produce anything like wht Money produces and it only shows checks or CC charges that cleared.
One time, this doctor's office said that I didn't pay one of their bills. I produced a report showing the payments, dates, and even check numbers. I made sure all the checks cleared - they did. I then walked in with the report, showed it to the office manager, and she just took it and said she'd confirm it. After not hearing anything for two days, I called. She said thta everything checked out and appologized.
I tried Money back in 2002. My Quicken files were up to 1.7M and would no longer fit on a backup floppy
Money imported my Quicken files and they swelled to 20 megs.
Must have been all of the Ads taking up space.
A friend I know runs a small business. They use MS Money to keep track of small finance items, sort of like a cash book.
:-)
They still use the 16-bit version of Money from the Windows 3.11 for Workgroup days. Why? Because it's simple, and all it does is the books. They won't upgrade because all the later versions of Money want to go on the internet and do other fancy things making it harder - not easier - to use. This is one of the points that the article mentions first.
Personally, I use gnucash and it does for me
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I think the market is pretty much non existent outside the US. At least I'm not aware of any supported software by my bank (Abn Amro, one of the major banks in the Netherlands) other than their own web based software.
And judging from the review, we aren't missing much. I pay my bills online and haven't seen the inside of a bank for several years.
Jilles
The trouble is, that marketing departments are usualy so far removed from Customer Service departments that to a marketing person "User Feedback" sounds like some sort of exotic disease...
Marketing departments are more interested in _telling_ users what they want, than asking them.
Advanced users are users too!
ahhh the old adage - "a good manager can manage anything". While that certainly may be true in some sectors and at some higher management levels (Corporate Officers etc) I think the reality for IT is a manager DOES need have some experience.
Based on my (admittedly somewhat narrow) experience you really do have to know something about the technology you are managing or your employees are going to walk all over you or attempt to subvert you, your clients will bypass you and you will be limited in your strategic planning due to wildly innacurate "saw it in a magazine so it must be right" type thinking.
Also I've seen first hand projects spin wildly out of control or fail to meet client's expectations due to last minute "golf course" promises or bizarre inexplicable "You don't need to know why just do it" decrees.
It's never too late to rule by fear though...
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).
Depends if you need those features or not. Spreadsheets today and 15 years ago started to get used by people who never would have used the paper versions. Further they got used by people who didn't know much math. In the early-mid 1980s that wasn't the case at all. I saw lots of people using things like matrix features of Lotus, non linear curve fitting, statistical tests which reflected the actual data... 20 years ago. Books like "Lotus 1-2-3 for engineers" or "Integrating SAS with Lotus" were popular.
What Microsoft deserves credit for was cutting the cost of high end spread sheets by 90-95% over a period of a few years and thus turning it from a high end feature to something everyone had. Of course the product aiming for the people not willing to buy Lotus would in general need to be easier to use and less feature rich.
Neither Quicken nor Money understands the information that they're downloading.
So, they go by the date of your last download. But you can override the date (in case you've deleted entries that you should not have).
So, they download everything for that date range, even if the information is ALREADY there.
I can understand doing it that way for the download, but they should also do some basic checks to see if duplicate entries exist. They don't.
In more technical terms, they are "brittle". As long as you don't make an error, they are fine. But people make mistakes.
If the banks TRULY supported those apps, they would be keyed on unique transaction numbers. The app could query the Bank's server for a list of transaction numbers associated with that account and then compare that list with the list it already had and just download any changes.
I'm not sure how long banks keep their transaction records, but if the apps were really supported, it would be possible to download all your data instead of picking a date and starting from there.
With the current level of "support", all you get is an automated method of receiving your monthly statement. You could get the same functionality by typing in your statement yourself.