We have our new vocabulary for the year
Apr. 21st, 2007 08:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
johnridley...at work. "Don't pull a Lacerte".
Lacerte is one of the professional tax prep systems whose electronic filing was affected in the Intuit (TurboTax) meltdown on the 17th. The user forums for the professional software involved are absolutely lit up. These people are stinkin' mad and they're getting pretty nasty in the forums. All I can say is "sucks to be them (Lacerte, not the users)."
The professional tax preparation software market is a zero-sum game. There are only so many preparers, and they already all use software. Sure, we try to convert users from other software to us, but that's a slow process. Real change in market share is based on hoping someone else screws up. It's just the nature of the business. Sure, we try to improve the product every year, but so does everyone else, and in the end the software all has to do pretty tightly controlled stuff.
Nobody's had a major screw-up for several years. We haven't to date at all. You can bet there will be added emphasis on load testing, scalability, and having spare capacity on hand all over, and you can bet that all non-Intuit sales people did a little schadenfreude dance when Intuit's servers melted down. When you really are in a zero-sum market, that's not surprising or even really bad. It's a hell of an incentive not to screw up.
Already we've seen an attitude internally of "give the electronic filing guys anything they say they need." Nobody wants to be the guy who denied an upgrade to a critical system that later melted down and caused user bail-out.
Lacerte is one of the professional tax prep systems whose electronic filing was affected in the Intuit (TurboTax) meltdown on the 17th. The user forums for the professional software involved are absolutely lit up. These people are stinkin' mad and they're getting pretty nasty in the forums. All I can say is "sucks to be them (Lacerte, not the users)."
The professional tax preparation software market is a zero-sum game. There are only so many preparers, and they already all use software. Sure, we try to convert users from other software to us, but that's a slow process. Real change in market share is based on hoping someone else screws up. It's just the nature of the business. Sure, we try to improve the product every year, but so does everyone else, and in the end the software all has to do pretty tightly controlled stuff.
Nobody's had a major screw-up for several years. We haven't to date at all. You can bet there will be added emphasis on load testing, scalability, and having spare capacity on hand all over, and you can bet that all non-Intuit sales people did a little schadenfreude dance when Intuit's servers melted down. When you really are in a zero-sum market, that's not surprising or even really bad. It's a hell of an incentive not to screw up.
Already we've seen an attitude internally of "give the electronic filing guys anything they say they need." Nobody wants to be the guy who denied an upgrade to a critical system that later melted down and caused user bail-out.
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no subject
Date: 2007-04-21 02:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-21 03:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-21 03:35 pm (UTC)http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199200359
This is not just delays, a lot of people were forced to refile.
I rewrote our systems several years ago because I realized that something like this could happen to them. Our systems now do not throw anything away for at least a month, and when they're overloaded they just slow down, they don't crash, and I can throw as many machines as I want to at it.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-21 04:40 pm (UTC)