gnucash roadahead

ted creedon tcreedon at easystreet.com
Wed Oct 19 21:54:21 EDT 2005


Try running a 1970 era business on a 32KB Data General Nova with a 2Meg
removable disk. It was done.

At least we're not wire wrapping boards to get the job done.

tedc 

-----Original Message-----
From: gnucash-user-bounces at gnucash.org
[mailto:gnucash-user-bounces at gnucash.org] On Behalf Of Robert Heller
Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2005 3:59 PM
To: gnucash-user at lists.gnucash.org
Subject: Re: gnucash roadahead

  Andrew Sackville-West <andrew at farwestbilliards.com>,
  In a message on Wed, 19 Oct 2005 10:45:36 -0700, wrote :

AS> table costs and donated it to GNC. QB/Quicken became a mature and 
AS> decent product many years ago and the company has had to change its 
AS> model to continue making money. They do this by providing annual 
AS> updates with lots of cruft, and then forcing those upgrades down 
AS> your throat if you use any of the other services they tack on. Not a 
AS> good plan. and they lock you in by preventing you from exporting 
AS> your information into other formats. </rant>

This is an (unfortunate) 'feature' of vendors of commodity software that
have locked themselves into a business model that is just not appropriate
for software.  Software is not like typical manufactured goods.  Software
never wears out or gets used up, so once the product hits a certain maturity
level, there is no need to 'buy it again'. 
Also since most of the time computer programmers spend their time fixing
existing code and not writing code from scratch, the software industry is
better thought of as a *service* industry, not a *manufacturing* industry.
This is a problem for vendors that have a manufacturing oriented business
model for producing and 'selling' software. Companies that 'produce'
software with the intent of selling lots of (mostly
empty) boxes at places like Staples or Media Play or Best Buy sooner or
later find themselves in a 'strange' situation: their product has matured
and their customer base has become saturated (virtually every potential
customer has a copy of the mature product and has no need to buy
'upgrades').  When this point happens the software vendor is faced with a
problem: how do they pay their programmers to work on only bug fixes and
security patches?  Eg, now that all of their customers have the big box with
the CD-ROM stuck in the middle, how do you collect for on-going minor
updates?  Can you entice them buy the software with a pile of bug fixes and
some cosmetic changes?  Or do you have to somehow 'strong arm' (eg extort) a
license fee out of your customer base?  It sounds like this has happened
with QB...


                                     \/
Robert Heller                        ||InterNet:   heller at cs.umass.edu
http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/~heller  ||            heller at deepsoft.com
http://www.deepsoft.com              /\FidoNet:    1:321/153






                        
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