[geeks] M$ crap == HUGE TCO and major headaches!

[joshua d boyd]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2001 at 11:33:32PM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> My company does run one M$-only application, Intuit's QuickBooks, but
> only because we were too lazy to do a little bit of manual paperwork,
> and too cheap to go out and pay up-front a proper solution that would
> run on Unix.  However I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that our TCO is
> now way higher than it would have been if we'd just kept writing little
> awk, python, ruby, etc. scripts to expand our original feeble hacks into
> production quality.  We run the damn thing under VMware now, but it's
> still a major hassle and costs us time and aggrevation every month.  I
> spent less time writing a complete report generation and typesetting
> system for our early feeble flat-file hacks than we've since spent
> figuring out even just the tiniest anomalies in some weird behaviour of
> QuickBooks.  Our biggest downfall was believing we needed commercially
> supported software to run our payroll.
> 
> (Of course if QuickBooks ran fully multi-user under X11 and used a more
> open DB it still might not be any better -- it's problem is it's
> designed to work only in the PC GUI environment, and since it's data
> paradigm is very OO it's got quirks that no change in choice of platform
> would eliminate.  It's easily 1000 times more complicated internally
> than it needs to be, at least for for the basic jobs we use it for.)

It is intersting that you mention QuickBooks.  I recently was talking to a
man who would very seriously pay several thousand dollars for a free (GPL
style) replacement.  The only catch is that the free replacement would
need a windows version that is fully functional (he has a lot of
proprietary software purchased for managing his business, and doesn't want
to be forced away from it right away).  I was talking to another man that
same night who would also pay quite a bit of money for quickbooks if it
would do invoicing his way, or allow him to cheaply pay someone to write a
new addon invoicing module (his invoicing needs are different from most
businesses, but I believe would be common among most plumbers,
electricians, etc).

So, who wants to get rich making the new QuickBooks?  I don't know enough
about accounting to really do it, but it doesn't sound like it would be
that hard, just a lot of grunt work.

By the way, has anyone here tried the Win32 version of MySQL?  Is it hard
to install, like if I wanted to ship a commercial package that sat on top
of it?

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd
http://www.cs.millersville.edu/~jdboyd/

IANAL: I am not a [lama|lawyer|luser|leper].