After the early love fest, I suppose that a backlash was inevitable. That said, I find the current round of Leopard bashing to be a bit of a puzzle. In my own experience, it has been even more stable than Tiger was. Spaces is far more usable than I expected, unmounting remote disks doesn’t kill the system, and I like all the little UI touches.

Tiger crashed on me about twice a month. In the month or so that I’ve had Leopard it has crashed zero times. Ok, it’s an admittedly small sample size but in my experience a bunch of stuff got better and nothing got worse.

I know that’s not a particularly pithy title, but I want to do my best to make this one show up in search results. This post should really be called something like, “How to Make Loyal Customers Hate Your Guts” or “What the Hell are they Thinking?”

So anyway, I am a fan of the bill pay service PayTrust. I’ve been a customer for about seven years, and recommended the service without hesitation. Reasonable price, works as advertised. I also use Quicken, so I was actually pleased when Intuit bought PayTrust. Great, I naively thought, they’ll integrate the products and it’ll get even better!

That was in early 2005.

Did they integrate?

They did not.

Not only did they fail to integrate, but Quicken actually went so far as to drop the QIF format which PayTrust exports. The result is that in order to use Quicken I have to enter all of my PayTrust transactions manually, which pretty much defeats the purpose of using it in the first place.

So, to sum up: Intuit went out of their way to make sure that two products they own don’t work with one another.

Why doesn’t PayTrust support Quicken’s preferred OFX format? I have no idea. I even found the product manager and tried to make the case. No dice.

They forced me to choose. Do I stick with Quicken, or do I stick with PayTrust?

Anyway, after realizing that I don’t do anything with Quicken other than track my spending, I decided to look at the others. Microsoft Money looks ok, and it imports QIF. GnuCash might be a contender as well.

Quicken, you are Dead To Me.

Anyway, I will think long and hard before ever purchasing another product from Intuit. Great work, guys.

Does this make any sense to anyone?

I’ve had this conversation a few times over the course of the last couple of weeks, so I thought I would write it down for the rest of you.

Here is my Second Rule of Product Development:

Given a choice between two products that do roughly the same thing, where one is noticeably “better” and the other is noticeably more convenient, the more convenient one wins.

People will actively choose a worse experience if it’s more convenient.

Time and again I’ve spoken with people whose products are focused around higher quality when more convenient alternatives are available. It doesn’t work. Higher quality is a good thing, don’t get me wrong, but unless it’s also more convenient than the existing options, few people are going to switch.

Don’t believe me? MP3s have worse sound than CDs or LPs. Camera phones are replacing digital cameras, which replaced point and shoot, which replaced manual. McDonalds burgers don’t taste anywhere near as good as what you can make at home. TV sucks, compared to movies. At each stage the quality of the experience goes down but convenience goes up. Amazingly enough, price frequently goes up at the same time (at least in the early stages). One of the few things that people can be relied upon to pay for is convenience.

As a side note, this is also why DRM is destined to fail. As long as it’s easier to get the files from bittorrent, that’s what people will do. It’s not about the money. People pay for content all the time. It’s about effort. Less effort wins. Full stop.

Yes, ye pickers of nit, there will always be niche markets devoted to pursuing the highest quality experience. Some people will stick with LPs because they sound better, insist on fiddling with the settings on their film cameras, and spend weekends fine tuning their car engines. These are all real people, but they are niche markets.

So, developers and product managers, look at your products. Are you building for convenience or quality?

Ok, I’m throwing down the gauntlet. Here’s your chance to make me look stupid (fine, stupider). Find me one product where higher quality won out over a comparable product that was more convenient.

I just heard that Sue James died. Cancer.

I knew her at Netscape and liked her a lot. She was a good SE. Small and slight, but always bubbly and full of energy. She was smart and kind of snarky, and I spent a lot of time talking with her. I didn’t stay touch and can’t say that we were close, but I only have fond memories.

Poor thing. I hope it didn’t hurt too much.