Anachostic

…I started travelling.  There’s some pretty bad mojo brewing up whenever I want to go back to my home state.  Last time, I was delayed a day and it was because I took the last flight out and because of previous delays, it was impossible to make my connection.  This time I scheduled the first flight out, meaning I got up at 2:45 in the morning to get ready.  Despite the plan that I could be bumped to later flights and do to people what they did to me the first time, the flight was still a no-go.  Thank you, blizzard.

And I thought I did everything I was supposed to.  I checked the flight status before I went to bed and when I woke up – all good.  When I checked in, I asked “any news?” – no, the flight is still active.  I got to the gate and within 10 minutes I hear my name paged.  Damn it, I know what this is about.

Similar to last time, I could make my first leg, but the second leg was cancelled.  I had the option of going to the first airport and trying to get on the next flight at 5:30.  That’s a 10-hour layover with a great chance of the flight either being overbooked or cancelled.  No thanks.  So after rescheduling for tomorrow,  back home I went.

I call the car rental company and modify my reservation.  Apparently, when you take one day off your reservation, you’re not in the “special rate” anymore and it suddenly costs you over $100 more.  So a brief check on Yahoo and I’m now renting from another company.  However, I’m still out $5 for my brief time of parking at the airport.  And gas, and time.  Luckily, no hotel reservations to change like last time, where they knocked me for $90.  I swear, companies make the most money when their customers are miserable.

I didn’t expect this post to have a sequel, but I guess it does.  My other website is in need of a redesign, so I was going to go with a product that I have used many times: Community Server.  It gives me a blog framework and a download section, which is primarily what I needed it for.

I had recently used Community Server (CS) at work and actually blogged a little about it.  We ended up not using it, but at that time when I was evaluating it, I was kind of surprised at how expensive it had gotten.  I mean thousands of dollars expensive.  We were lucky that for our needs we fell under the Express license, which was free.  I don’t think we could have justified the expense to buy it.

So today I went back to the CS website to get the latest Express version for my personal site.  The web site had changed dramatically and I didn’t see any references to Community Server.  It was so different, I couldn’t even tell they sold a community product.  A short bit of browsing later, I found out they eliminated the Express version - they had no free version anymore.  I discovered this news in a support forum and the post had a lot of links to other posts for more information.  But to read those posts, you had to login.  Luckily, I already had an account from previous dealings with them, but for others, how crappy is it that you have to sign up to learn you’re being denied.

Ok, so now we understand.  Your product is now too good for normal people.  You only care about BIG companies.  Ones that can afford what must be obscenely-priced products.  In fact, the price must be so obscene, you have to convince people to buy it.  How do I know that?  Because you can’t buy the damn product without talking to a sales person.  There’s no shopping cart.  If you actually showed the prices on the website, you’d get no customers at all.  That reminds me of the shock I got when I was evaluating the CS product the last time.  I recall a company representative being displeased that someone had leaked the pricing onto their forums (where I and many others could see it). 

By eliminating the free version, they also eliminated a dedicated group of users who would give back to the community (there’s that word again) by posting enhancements and extensions to the base CS product.  I did make my own small enhancement, but I never posted it, since it wasn’t really practical for many people.  I also participated in a couple forum discussions and shared some code with others, so I gave back a little.  With less people using the product (because they priced them right out), they will find the support from other users to shrink proportionally.  I hope their internal support team is ready for this.  And when people pay 5 figures for software, they expect a high level of service and support.

So how well is this strategy working for them?  Their latest update to the community product has had 123 downloads in almost a month.  Compare this to thousands of downloads when their pricing structure favored small businesses and hobbyists.  And the funny part is the download has been rated at 2 out of 5 stars!  Oh how funny, their database is down as I write this.  No downloads, no forums, no support.

Now they are no longer going to be able to call themselves the biggest, most-used, most-popular anymore.  But what enterprise software uses the term “popular” anyway?  They’re just so beyond that.  And so…

Farewell, Community Server.

Like a bad sequel, I get to continue a story that should have ended.  As I discover some things in Quicken I don’t like, I check the opinions of blogs and Quicken’s own support forums and I am saddened by what I learn.  I guess none of my gripes are new, but they are mine.

I’m sure I’m going to have lots of fun matching transactions as time goes on.  I’m convincing myself that the real numbers matter starting next month - a fresh month of a fresh year.  But right now things are off.  One of my accounts had to have an adjustment posted to make it match with the last bank statement.  That worries me.  As I cleaned up the categories for my transactions, I found that when I would categorize a transaction as a transfer, it would helpfully create the other side of the transfer for me, duplicating a previously-downloaded transaction in another account.  So with all the credit card payments I categorized, I suddenly had a massively negative balance in my checking account.  More cleanup…

As I worked through these various screens I found myself missing a Microsoft standard: the Back button.  I remember years ago when I tried out the Zune at Staples, I thought to myself, “MS loves the Back button.”  The Zune has one.  And you know, it is the easiest concept for anyone to understand.  I also was a little weirded out at how some screens are windows of their own and some are in the main window.

And continuing with UI issues, I found the little things to be the most annoying.  Like being unable to resize columns.  The text in a column is truncated, but you can’t expand the column to see it.  You have to mouse over each row to see the tooltip.  I’m slowly getting used to Quicken’s way of doing subcategories – using a colon.  Money had that format as an option, but I turned it off.  The UI, overall, is definitely from another line of thinking – and not very much in line with Microsoft’s design recommendations.  I’ve had the argument before about how being consistent with Microsoft design helps a user understand your application quicker.  The additional time it is taking me to understand how Quicken works is a fine example of this.  Holy crap, I just discovered that some (4) popup windows I thought had closed actually didn’t.  They’re in a pseudo-taskbar at the bottom of the main window.  Good god.

Now the bigger issues.  The biggest being that the filtered view in the register does not maintain the proper running balance.  It shows a running balance of the transactions shown.  This makes the filtered view useless, but Quicken users have been living with it since the feature was introduced.  That’s nearly a deal-breaker, but I’m going to stick it out.  The other big one is there is no transaction entry form (that I can find).  You have to enter all your info directly in the register.  This brought back a very distant memory of when I first used Quicken and I didn’t like that method of entry.  Money provided a more presentable form for entry and it was a significant selling point.  Money also allowed the option to enter transactions Quicken-style.  Funny how Money tried to implement a more Quicken-esqe experience and ended up being the one that failed.

I feel a bit sad that Quicken is now the only major player in this software category.  Mostly because I know they can never make the changes needed to satisfy the MS Money crowd without ruining the experience of legacy Quicken users.

So I’m at the 7th and final stage of grieving: acceptance.  I have accepted that Microsoft Money is gone and will not be coming back, so I must move to Quicken.  It’s not without trepidation that I purchase Quicken and try to recapture the enjoyment of tracking my finances with a new program.  I had used Quicken a long time ago and was not as pleased as I was with MS Money, which is probably why I’ve used Money for over 10 years.

So I’ve gotten Quicken Deluxe 2010 installed and the first thing that pisses me off is that it has put icons on my desktop.  Not just one icon, which is tolerable, but 4.  One for the application and three sales pitches.  This is a terrible first impression.  One shortcut is to a co-branded version of FreeCreditReport dot COM – one of the biggest scams out there.  One is for their BillPay service, at $10/mo.  Even Wachovia, a premier bank, only charges $6/mo for integrated BillPay.  Unless Quicken doesn’t have 2-way integration with Wachovia, which is practically a dealbreaker for me.  MS Money had it. (Turns out, yes, Quicken does support online payments through Wachovia)  The final offer is for a typical rewards credit card provided by Chase.

First Launch: I am prompted to “Get Started”.  I have to enter my banks and their login info so Quicken can download transactions and whatnot.  I’m mildly impressed.  In MS Money, this was a separate step after setting up accounts.  It picks up my Wachovia account without a problem.  Then I do my Chase account.  Oops, there was a problem.  It says to try again later.  So I think, “Maybe it should be entered as a WaMu account, since that’s where it was originally opened.”  Nope.  Not found there.  It’s later now, so I try again under Chase.  Quicken crashes.  Ok, my impression of this program is sinking fast.

Second Launch: I get all of my accounts set up.  And I am quite impressed with how well it handled ALL of my accounts.  If I had a login for it, Quicken handled it.  I got my loans entered and the wizard was pretty easy to work through.  I browse through the preferences and set a few things to my liking, like two-line registers.  Now, I am downloading transactions for an account that doesn’t have real-time transaction updates.  And it’s frozen.  However, I was able to close the window (X) and it seemed to be a successful update.  We’ll see how that turns out on the others… ok, three of the four I had to close the window, but they seem current.  Not sure of this is going to be an annoyance or it’s just a fluke.

I’m going to give it an honest try, since I have no other choice, really.  I’ve tried GnuCash and that was definitely a step down.  So we’ll see how quick things get.

My personal domain name is up for renewal.  I’ve been with Network Solutions as my registrar for a very long time, 15 years, maybe.  A whole lot of low-cost registrars have popped up during that time, but I always stuck with the leader.

Now, recent re-evaluation shows I don’t really have a need for any of the services NetSol offers, so why should I be paying a premium price for their services?  Let’s take a look and see what the cost of renewal is with NetSol.  I just want to renew my domain.

This is where NetSol has really shot itself in the foot.  Not only is it a premium-priced registrar, it seems they are so money-hungry, they want to take every attempt to get more out of you.  After clicking renew, I am taken to a series of advertisements about other things I should be buying.

First, a pitch to add additional domains.  These are variations on my existing domain.  No, I don’t see any need to have three more domains with less-recognizable suffixes (or TLD’s for the technical). No thank you; next.

Next, a pitch to make my registration details private ($9/yr).  Other people have complained about this before.  Why should I have to pay extra for privacy?  And had I bought extra domains, multiply that $9 per domain.  Next!

Next, a pitch for web hosting.  New domains, hmmm. ok.  Existing domains, you probably already have hosting.  If you were transferring a domain, that would be another valid opportunity.  But, no.  I’m fine where I’m at.

Next, a pitch for forwarding web requests, mail hosting, custom website design (even if you selected no web hosting), and an SSL certificate.  Jesus, isn’t this simple renewal request ever going to end?  This is four full pages of advertising! 

Then, finally, you get to see the price of renewal: $35/yr.  4x the amount of other registrars?  For what?  4 pages of ads when you renew?  Now, you can see that NetSol has been overtaken by salespeople and scammers.  Granted, there are discounts for multi-year renewals, which is how I’ve stayed with NetSol as long as I have.

The way I see it, when you click renew, you should be taken straight to the shopping cart where a line item shows the domain(s) for renewal.  Under the line items, a line with a checkbox for each of these offered services should be shown.  Clicking the checkbox would expand the section to let you choose which renewing domains will get the service.  Obviously a “Learn more about service” link would be provided.

That’s quick, simple and to the point.  One page, all options available.  Instead, NetSol is afraid that if they don’t shout the features and prices at you in a full page ad, you might not take them up on their overpriced services.  In the virtual world as well as the real world, overselling, overhyping, and shouting drives me out the door.

Farewell, Network Solutions.