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.
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 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.
I do, seriously. I’m right there with you. No argument. People should face no discrimination in the workplace because of their race, religion, skin color, or sexual orientation. Hiring and promotions should go to the most qualified people. Shibboleth. It’s good business. As a Jew, I personally benefit from policies of inclusiveness. I already agreed when you hired me (five years ago), and I still do today.
Can you please stop selling it to me now? Can we please talk about something else… just for a little while? I wish that I could get a little button or a lapel pin that says “I’m IN!”. Maybe a little check box on my driver’s license so that I don’t need to hear about it anymore. Is there a test I can take?
If I don’t attend the Diversity Empowerment Team’s weekly speaker series of black women talking about how they overcame the problems in their lives, it’s not because I don’t think that those struggles are real. It’s not because I don’t think that those people’s stories are worth telling. It’s because, well, I have work to do. I’m happy for them that things worked out. Really. I wish them well.
Ok, this is a dangerous topic so I’m going to make myself perfectly clear here: I support diversity in my workplace as it has been defined by my employer. Really. I just wish they spent a bit less time shoving it down my throat.
So I’m traveling to London for work. The usual peon rooms are all booked, so they’re putting me in a Super King Executive Suite.
It’s my first trip to England, and there’s all kinds of stuff that I don’t know. I mean, what are the duties of Super King? Am I supposed to fight crime? Do I get a sidekick? Am I licensed to kill? I bet the room has all kinds of cool science gizmos and an underground lair. I think it’s pretty well known that science is better when it’s underground.
I need to start working on a theme song.
I can’t wait to get over there and start being King. Where are my Monkey Butlers? What do you mean you don’t have any Monkey Butlers? Super King demands Monkey Butlers! In hats! And a pony! And have one of the monkeys ride on the pony when he brings me the TV remote! To heck with that, I’m far too busy to watch TV. Have one of the monkeys watch TV for me, as well. But I’ll tell him what channel. Take that, monkeys.
Best of all: I’m not just the Super King, I’m the Super King EXECUTIVE. I bet that means I get to boss the other Super Kings around. I will be a cruel boss, but fair. And cruel. The other Super Kings will resent me at first, but over time my heroic deeds and brutal cruelty will win them over.
The new Battlestar Galactica is made from pure, undiluted awesomeness that has been distilled into a concentrate and then dried, ground, fermented with herbs and spices, and finally reconstituted with fresh awesomeness. It’s an amped up, uber-awesomeness that shows how hollow and empty everything previously thought to be awesome really was.
The last few episodes of the “mini season” had been merely so-so, however, and I was starting to worry that they’d run out of steam. I loved the resistance on New Caprica episodes, but the “final five” bit got really strange (and not in a good way), and I was starting to worry that they were going Twin Peaks on me.
Last night’s episode proves that they haven’t lost any of what made the show great. It was six months worth of plot and excitement, packed into forty minutes of TV.
What makes the show so appealing is that it focuses on the humanity of the story. The science fiction stuff is just window dressing, and often provides only the barest of pretense for the stories. It’s a show about love and honor, about people making catastrophic mistakes and living with the consequences, and about how sometimes there are truly hard decisions with only bad choices available — intelligently written and well acted.
It’s got all of that AND killer robots, beautiful women, space battles, betrayals, and ray guns!
Leopard enters the spin cycle
