This weekends Yahoo!Xtra bubble debacle left me wondering about Telecom. I men this is no inexperienced start up her, they’re a long term player with significant engineering and marketing nous. How could they possibly get it so wrong?
As others have commented, why oh why did they not introduce the new platform as a beta, test it thoroughly while still offering boring old traditional webmail and then, at some point in the future, make the decision whether to ditch version 1.0 or not. As others have pointed out, other webmail providers run traditional and beta platform contemporaneously so its not like it can’t technically be done or anything.
I guess it’s the sort of thing that we’ve come to expect of the P&T - no doubt someone will be offered up as a sacrificial lamb at some stage.
The other thing I wondered about is why on earth people still use ISP webmail at all. I mean email addresses are readily obtained, be they gmail, geekzone, yahoo etc etc. Tying your email address to the ISP you connect through is the craziest thing ever. A number of my non geek friends have the situation where they are unable to change ISP’s becuase they are worried about losing mail. They’ve bought into a fantastic model (for the ISP’s) - gain a captive market and lock them in.
Please people, acquire an independent email address….
Some may think this a little “right on” but anyway…..
September 15 has been designated Blog Action Day when bloggers around the world (and let’s face it, bloggers may be left or right, climate change pundits or deniers but they are very rarely fence sitters) get to do their bit to help the environment.
So… I have to admit it - we still use MYOB here at Cactus. We need some functionality that Xero doesn’t yet have and it’s the best of the NZ customised offering currently available.
But it sucks, it really really really does.
The other day I installed the upgrade (and yes of course we had to pay for it) to Premier11.
The install went OK, no files were deleted, our customised forms worked etc etc.
First problem is that in a mixed XP/Vista network environment MYOB runs about as slow as is humanly possible to imagine. I contact MYOB and in their wisdom they told me that;
Please be aware that MYOB do not support set up or troubleshooting of networks related issue, but I have attached some information our product specialist has put together that may be of assistance
Bear in mind that this is a specifically engineered product that provides multi user functionality. What the feck did thy expect people would do with it? Run multiple virtual machines on one PC and open copies simultaneously on the same machine? Networking and multiuser capability may as well be the same thing when we’re talking about accounting software. The attached information that the “product specialist” sent was a developers guide to user access control for Microsoft Vista - which is going to help me exactly not at all to sort out the slow networking issues.
The time is ripe for change - the incumbents should be taken out the back and shot - Xero understand what SME’s need, broadband is not great but good enough and cloud based apps are an acceptable delivery method.
In what can only be comforting to the Xero crew, Workday is pushing it’s mid level ERP product to enterprise. Workday’s product is targeted at enterprises turning over USD500mill to USD2bill (and that’s mi level in the states - sheesh) and is deliveed via an on demand, in the clouds format (read SaaS).
Many SaaS commentators (myself included) where cautious about whether businesses would embrace the mind shift to having their data domiciled “in the clouds”, my concerns were centred around concerns about security of information, security and integrity of data and access issues.
If Workday gains traction and starts picking up significant mid-level enterprises to its product, it will only help to build the credibility of a ERP SaaS solution. This is the very credibility that Xero (and their ilk) will utilise to build their on momentum in the SME space.
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