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Happy Endings Todd Stauffer
(tstauffer@webintosh.com)
Little-endian Marketing
Unfortunately, there probably isn't a way for this column to come off as anything other than defensive. I don't think that's the thrust of the argument, although it might be part of my reason for writing it. It's about that Quicken thing.
I don't think the Windows model works in the Macintosh world. Deep in the process of writing a book on upgrading and repairing the Macintosh (in fact, I'd promised myself I'd avoid columns for the next few weeks), I find that one of my pre-book inkling about the Mac market was correct. The amazing inherent value in the Macintosh and many of its products preclude the Windows model for success -- chew it up and spit it out at an upgrade price.
Mac owners have known this for a long time -- Macs just work. They just continue to work. Mac software works. You use the stuff long enough to appreciate it. In my office now are a Power Macintosh 6100 (4 years) a PowerBook 540c (3 years) and even a Mac IIci (8 years?), all of which have their place. Granted, the Mac SE/30 is sitting on the floor in his travel bag, but he's just waiting for a hapless college student who needs a little help from her Mac godfather.
My versions of Emailer, ClarisWorks, Quicken, Newswatcher, PageSpinner, BBEdit, Fetch and, yes, even Word 6.0 have been working pretty hard since their last upgrades. And, PageSpinner's awesome plug-in architecture notwithstanding, I don't really need many more features for any of them.
It's this approach that's affected Quicken. It seems clear that Intuit has not killed its Macintosh line, although the ineptitude of their PR is astounding. They're simply not coming out with a Fall 1998 version, as far as I can tell.(They already have a version called Quicken '98 on the shelves, so things seem current enough to me.) If demand is high enough for a Quicken '00 version for Mac, they'll probably write it.
I, for one, won't miss Quicken '99. I wasn't going to buy it anyway.
Smaller focus
The problem with marrying the Mac market and the Windows market is something I'm going to call "marketing endianism." Just as the big-endian/little-endian problem places a hurdle in the way of successfully porting OS-level code from Intel to Motorola platforms, the big-endian/little-endian market demands make it tough for the Windows model to work in the Mac world. Quicken is an obvious example.
Judging from their complaints, their Web site and their booth at MacWorld, Intuit likes to sell new products every year. They want people coming back for more. They want to sell the "Deluxe" edition with little QuickTime movies of professional financial planners giving advice. They want to sell laser-printer checks, Web site advertising and take a little off the top of any number of transactions.
But Quicken's Mac customers just want a checkbook-management program.
I'm currently using Quicken 7.0 for my personal transaction management, and I've been searching for a reasonably interesting Pilot-based solution for tracking transactions on an immediate basis, then uploading to my Quicken version. Donna uses Quicken 4.0, which still hasn't worn out -- it just continues to accept and compute, as if it were brand new.
Unfortunately, good products are for little-endian companies. Witness Fog City's Emailer, which was rolled into Claris, marginalized, then put in limbo. I love how the update changed the interface so that the buttons were more 3-D. Great move. It also rolled all the Emailer files into a database making searches a little faster, which is good. Unfortunately, it also makes selectively archiving your email a pain in the butt, which is bad.
I miss most of the old behaviors in the old version. If it'd still been a Fog City application, I probably would have already had it out with the project manager by now and maybe we'd look into V-Twin technology for searching the text-based messages that can more easily be managed. (I upgraded for the faster search and multiple-signature support, in case you're curious.)
Live our way
Obviously, Mac users have already chosen quality over some of the other big-endian marketing approaches to computing. But if we're going to do a good job at this different way of computing, we're going to have to work together to make sure we stay true to the philosophy. That means supporting smaller developers -- including shareware developers -- by paying them for good programs.
In a really great world, you'd make enough money doing something that you love -- like writing a cool checkbook program with hooks into the Quicken file format -- and people in the community would pay you enough that you wouldn't feel the need to sell out to a corporate giant. In fact, software would be written for groups of people interested in solving a problem, not written and packaged to encourage an upgrade.
As Mac aficionados, we've already subscribed to little-endian economics. That means supporting companies like Fog City, Connectix, Infowave, Micromat, Insignia, MacTell, Netopia and all our friends listed over on Kagi. That means paying for shareware, expressing your support and using the programs to their fullest. If we can just keep away from the lure of big-endian Wintel marketing -- where the largest company with the most lawyers usually wins -- then maybe we'll continue our way of computing happily toward the horizon.
In the meantime, if anyone wants to write a Quicken-killer that scales easily to handheld devices, I'll buy it. It doesn't even need 3-D buttons.
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