Online or Offline

Today I read a Newsblog by Elsa Wenzel at CNET titled Intuit building Quicken Online.

Intuit is planning to release a Web-based edition of its leading personal finance application this winter, possibly early in 2008. Quicken Online marks a key transition for a company that has made its bones selling new versions of its boxed software each year.

Quickbooks Online edition has been available for some time, and I’ve yet to hear much about it. Intuit offers a 30 day free trial of the product – and then 40% off the first thee months subscription rate. I was curious what that rate is, but the product requires IE6 or IE7 with ActiveX to work, and that’s just too annoying. Wenzel reports the new Quicken Online will be similarly burdened with Explorer.

I found another Quickbooks webpage where they claimed 75% savings and offered two products – one at $20 per month and the other at $40 per month. Both cover three seats. I’m too annoyed to try to figure out what the difference between the products is – but it’s interesting to see the company making differently priced offerings at different places on their official website. It must be very confusing.

What I can see of Quickbooks Online is that it appears to function just like their ancient box software. Of course this familiarity is important when migrating customers from the old model to a new model. But, what is really new about the new model?

The two elements that I can see that would really stand out are the global access and the automatic backups. And of course, the annuity income is new for Quickbooks. Low monthly billing that adds up to more than the old.

Will QB users migrate to the more expensive online edition?

From Wenzel’s article:

A few years ago, folks at Intuit told me they saw virtually no demand for online tools. Last week, the company said it's taken so long to cook up Quicken Online due to the lack of consumer trust. While it may be common for those within the technobubbles of Silicon Valley and San Francisco to opt for paperless billing, many millions more see managing their money via the Internet as about as safe as dropping a wallet in a mall.

I have to agree. Every small business I’ve encountered is absolutely terrified of the internet. Last week, I couldn’t get a small company to even consider using google mail for their domain (free vs fee) because they were somehow sure Google would reveal some deeply secure restaurant secret to the Feds.

And recently, I’ve found it nearly impossible to get anyone over 30 to sign up on FaceBook. I’ve even been told that FaceBook is a secret CIA database to gather information about everyone in the world.

The fears may be unfounded (I hope), but they are quite real. I can talk and talk and talk, but the fear is too great.

Somehow, I expect these fears dissipate inversely with age. If you’re young and grew up with the web, you’re likely to better understand the realistic dangers and rewards of online applications. There certainly are reasons why you might choose to keep financial data local – and well secured.

I can’t predict the rise of online accounting for this very reason. Is it inevitable? Maybe not. Most of the business people I know are hesitant to allow even a pro into their books. This is probably because most of them are cheating Uncle Sam to some degree or another (and not doing a good job of hiding it). Will these people be persuaded to put the data up at Intuit where the Feds will have centralized access for data mining? (Which is now legal without a warrant)

Now I’m sounding like a conspiracy nut.

Only time will tell.

In the meantime, we’re designing Geebis to be browser and platform independent. You won’t have to use Windows. You won’t have to use IE. We’re also designing the software to be online or offline. Let the customer choose.

Bell bottomed pants, pet rocks, and hula hoops

How do you tell the difference between a fad and a trend?

I still meet people today (though noticeably fewer) who tell me that computers are a fad that will pass away. They tend to be older people, often men who never learned to type.

I remember when typing was considered "unmanly". I had a short period in my early adulthood where I was teaching other adults to type. The guys were always resistant.

People who claimed computers would pass away like the next fad were taken seriously in the '70s and '80s. A crop of "the internet is insignificant" arose in the '90s. Often, I meet people who do not use computers or only use them for email (and can't figure out how to do those crazy attachments). They tend to be public school teachers. No kidding.

So, despite public school teachers being one of the most resistant groups to technology, technology is embedding itself deeply in the next generation. I am frightened what might happen when education decides it must teach technology. At that point, will we see massive failure? Perhaps it's best to leave the kids alone. They seem to learn a great deal more that way.

From the New York Times today:

While young people embrace the Web with real or virtual friends and their cell phone is never far away, relatively few like technology and those that do tend to be in Brazil, India and China, according to a survey.

Only a handful think of technology as a concept, and just 16 percent use terms like "social networking," said two combined surveys covering 8- to 24-year-olds published on Tuesday by Microsoft and Viacom units MTV Networks and Nickelodeon.

"Young people don't see "tech" as a separate entity - it's an organic part of their lives," said Andrew Davidson, vice president of MTV's VBS International Insight unit.

"Talking to them about the role of technology in their lifestyle would be like talking to kids in the 1980s about the role the park swing or the telephone played in their social lives -- it's invisible."

What we older folks think of as "technology" has embedded itself so deeply in the younger generation that it cannot be thought of as separate.

Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore.

QuickBooks EasyStep Interview

Imagine being an average Joe trying to get a business up and running.

The slideshow below documents the 28 screens of information that have to be addressed to setup QuickBooks. To add insult to injury, the process is called "Easysteps".

taxonomies and hierarchical file structures - and meaning

Howard Reingold on David Weinberger's book, Everything is Miscellaneous:

It’s not just a new story and a big picture, it’s a new picture and a big story. I think he’s right that most knowledge has been structured and so many institutions has been arranged according to taxonomies and hierarchical file structures simply because we have been arranging knowledge for thousands of years, but we only got search engines recently. Search engines are not just search engines in Weinberger’s new picture, and tagging is not just tagging.

From Weinberger's book:

That humans play a role in categorizing the world is not news. There is a difference now, though. For the first time, we have an infrastructure that allows us to hop over and around established categorizations with ease. We can make connections and relationships at a pace never before imagined. We are doing so together. We are doing so in public. Every hyperlink and every playlist enriches our shared miscellany, creating potential connections that we can’t often anticipate. Each connection tell us something about the connected things, about the person who made the connection, about the culture in which a person could make such a connection, about the sorts of people who find that connection worth noticing. This is how meaning grows. Whether we’re doing it on purpose or simply by leaving tracks behind us, the public construction of meaning is the most important project of the next hundred years.

Wow. Control of information creates "meaning".

Nobody loves control more than the accountants do. From QuickBooks to Great Plains (what is Microsoft calling it this week?) to PeopleSoft, the accountants rule with an iron hand.

Although business software is a great deal more than accounting, accounting remains at the core center of the design. Everything bows down to the chart of accounts. It is a perfect example of "taxonomies and hierarchical file structures".

When I talk to QuickBooks users, one of the most common praises they have is for the main menu. It's a graphic diagram of modules telling the user what must be done and in what order. This is a structured "you must do" list.

If you don't do what you're supposed to do, and do it in the right order, there'll be hell to pay.

These controls assure that the accountant's rules will be followed.

But in the real world, successful small businesses break the rules. To be successful, they have to break the rules. They don't have time to be accountants. So, they eventually learn which pieces of QB are necessary, and which aren't. They abandon whole systems.

And, ultimately, the taxes get done - usually derived from income and expenses on a monthly basis from the checkbook. I'm not sure, but I doubt QB can create this simple report easily - even though 90% or more of their clients do their taxes this way.

So, what we have is a sham.

We have software designed by accountants in accord with priestly 18th Century rules. And everyone is cheating. The accountants too.

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Reingold and Weinberger are talking about the decline of hierarchy. The information age is resculpting our world much in the same way the printing press ended the iron-fisted control of the Holy Roman Church.

All of our institutions - Finance, Government, Education, Commerce - are increasingly irrelevant (they have less and less "meaning") Tomorrow's world will be unrecognizable compared to today's.

The authoritarian model we see repeated thoughout our culture is fundamentally incompatible with the free flow of information. With information in the hands of users rather than overlords, so is "meaning".

QuickBooks, Great Plains and PeopleSoft are business softwares written by accountants for accountants. Or, more abstractly speaking, software written to protect and enforce the authoritarian paradigm.

With Geebis, we are abandoning this dying model in favor of user freedom. Geebis is search, data, and simple tools to manipulate the data. The user is free to do what they want to do. The user creates their own "meaning".

The past shapes the future

Here is a fantastic lecture given by Van Jacobson at Google TechTalks. Van Jacobson explains how telephony defined networking as we know it today.

It's 80 minutes long, but well worth the time.

Technology has changed dramatically, and now the structures we have created in the past are no longer helpful, but rather a barrier toward moving forward.

ABSTRACT Today's research community congratulates itself for the success of the internet and passionately argues whether circuits or datagrams are the One True Way. Meanwhile the list of unsolved problems grows.

Security, mobility, ubiquitous computing, wireless, autonomous sensors, content distribution, digital divide, third world infrastructure, etc., are all poorly served by what's available from either the research community or the marketplace. I'll use various strained analogies and contrived examples to argue that network research is moribund because the only thing it knows how to do is fill in the details of a conversation between two applications. Today as in the 60s problems go unsolved due to our tunnel vision and not because of their intrinsic difficulty. And now, like then, simply changing our point of view may make many hard things easy.

I am reminded of a discussion I had with a friend over lunch about the engineering of cell phone communication between the receiver and the tower. Most people envision a line of signal between their phone, and the tower. But, this is false. The tower creates a mist, and all data is everywhere in the mist. Your cell phone hears your call because it has the ability to identify the data in the mist which is yours.

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I wonder how these ideas might be applicable to software design.

Jacobson talks about the failure of telephone to telephone communication. You don't really want to ring a phone on the other side of the continent. What you really want to do is talk to someone. You don't really care where they are. Just let me talk to them.

So, isn't this the same as forcing someone to go to a hierarchical structure, and navigate to a module where the task they want to be performed can be facilitated. If you want to create a new customer, you must go to the customer module.

All the user wants to do is create a new customer.

So, can we create a system that will strip out the unnecessary "controls" that get in the way of allowing users the freedom to do what they want to do?

Our original concepts for Geebis were radical in that we recognized the importance of search as a (perhaps "the") central element in new friendly design.

All the content in the world is pretty useless if you can't find it.

Now, we are moving further away from traditional thought as we consider the elimination or minimization of module structures. Let the user say what he wants to do (search), give him relevant feedback (search results), and let him do directly what he wants to do.

No need for a structured new customer tab, with fixed functions.

So, the user types "new cust" or some variation into the search box. Up comes the search results. They click on make new customer, and voila, they are at a screen to make new customers.


I'm a bit nervous about entirely abandoning hierarchy structure. I'm still thinking of an iGoogle kind of home page where users can define searches for things or places in buttons. Thus, a user could create and maintain a hierarchy to their own liking.

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Interfaces That Feel Good

There's an interesting piece on Daring Fireball about interfaces that feel good. It is relivant to Geebis Books because these are the types of guidelines we are already following.

Basically what John Gruber concludes is that an interface's annoyingness is not necessarily measured in keystrokes.

The primary focus of Geebis is to make finding your objects easy. To do that, we're working on a searching interface that is similar to gmail's. We've created a parser with JavaCC that reads complex search strings and gives you what you would expect like:

name:"John Smith" company:"Linux Group of Rochester" -label:deadbeat

If you executed this in the customer module, it would give you a list of all customers whose name is "John Smith" who work for "Linux Group of Rochester" and who are not labeled "deadbeat". This will provide advanced users the ability to quickly find their data.

This example is fairly verbose, but we plan on offering aliases for the field names that we provide, like:

n:"john smith" c:"linux group of rochester" -l:deadbeat

and since this query is probably overly specific, you could probably find what you're looking for with:

n:john c:linux -l:deadbeat

And of course, you don't have to specify a field name for a criteria, you could simply search for:

john linux -deadbeat

This is nothing new in the realm of search engines, but outside of that domain it is rare.

The exact grammars haven't been determined yet, but we plan on providing lots cool shortcuts to users.

New Web Site & Content

We've had a new website up for a while now, but there was no content on it. Now there are links that point to various pages containing information about Geebis Books.

Check out the new page: http://www.geebis.org. There are screenshots and you can follow the blog from the front page.

GWT & db4o

Recent work on Geebis has focused on re-evaluating some of our technology choices. Wicket has undergone some changes, abandoning 2.0 (the version we are targeting) and focusing on updating the stable branch (1.2) to incorporate the features of 2.0 in 1.3. The changes to our project are fairly minor, but Wicket has a number of issues dealing with Ajax and Javascript keeping the backend in sync with the client. It is just plain hard to do some of the user interface tricks we want to do in Geebis. This is where Google Web Toolkit comes in. http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/ GWT is an open source Java Toolkit that compiles directly into Javascript and runs on Apache without Tomcat. GWT will allow us to do all the cool things we want to on the client side without having to worry about syncing with the server. It is open source and runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.

The other major technological change is db40. Check it out at http://www.db4o.com/. db40 is an object database, which means that it requires you to perform none of the extra steps that come with using a relational database, just store the objects exactly as they are! Hibernate has too many dependencies for a small project like ours. Using an object database allows us to get rid of the ORM layer and with it a whole swath of dependencies and annotations. The code is simpler and easier to read.

LinuxGroup

Work on Geebis has been proceding at a slow pace lately because we have been focusing on LinuxGroup of Rochester, a new venture which hopes to provide IT support, web design, and data services for Rochester and Monroe County.

http://www.linuxgroupofrochester.com/

After several months of work we are very proud and are finally ready to unveil the new site. Rest assured that our commitment to Geebis is just as strong as ever. We are committed to providing small business accounting software and are excited to continue developing innovative software features. LinuxGroup will help us to extend our network of clients and help to broaden awareness of our software design expertise. Besides, it will be fun.