
Microsoft Dumps MS Money: Yes, Web Apps Had Something to do With It - transburgh
http://mashable.com/2009/06/11/microsoft-dumps-ms-money/
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jsdalton
What surprises me about this, and perhaps where I disagree with the article,
is that personal finance is hardly a solved problem -- particularly by web 2.0
apps.

I do use Mint and I actually love it. But it's mostly just for checking my
balances in one place and maybe checking out some of my transactions. I used
to use MS Money, and before that Quicken, before the applications themselves
devolved into bloatware and banks limited their access.

I guess I just find it surprising that MS didn't see this as an opportunity to
compete as a web application against what's actually a pretty weak field. Not
that I would personally give MS high odds at winning such a competition, mind
you...

~~~
spoiledtechie
I know, why didn't MS Money try and compete? They could have pulled a ton of
leverage with many banks. They already had the backbone. They should have just
flexed a bit of muscle... No innovation in this area shows what will happen in
other areas. And that will inevitably mean MSoft might just fail big time if
they don't innovate like the start ups are doing.

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chollida1
> How can applications like Mint (Mint reviews) and Quicken, which Microsoft
> is now chasing to replace MS Money, come years after MS Money, and take away
> its market share?

Umm Quicken came before Microsoft Money.

1991 is the first year I can find for Money 1.0 vs Quicken which was already a
product by 1988.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuit>

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edave
I think the article makes some good points in general, but largely misses the
fact that MS Money was not that great of a program in many aspects, nor did it
innovate. Likewise with Encarta- it seems that these programs were designed in
the 90s and then tried as much as possible to keep that mindset, even as they
introduced new features.

~~~
TomOfTTB
You are absolutely wrong about this. MS Money was a great program that
innovated quite a bit.

The Money team was one of the first Microsoft Groups to realize the web was a
paradigm shift. They did two things that are noteworthy.

First, they very early on integrated themselves with banks (sort of a Proto
Programmable Web). Most people don't realize Money was connecting to banks a
year before Quicken (who offered imports of files but no direct connect)

Second, they realized the web was also a UI shift and wrote a shrinkwrapped
app as a web application (I suspect not making it a shrinkwrapped app was
beyond their power). In fairness they were clearly inspired by Quicken's use
of hyperlinks in program but they took what Quicken did and went one better.

You can see a lot of that from this screenshot (note it's 2002):
[http://images.sudhian.com/articles/ShuttleLinux/PartIV/MSMon...](http://images.sudhian.com/articles/ShuttleLinux/PartIV/MSMoney.jpg)

MS Money was actually a revolutionary product in many ways. So much so that
people didn't realize how revolutionary it was at the time.

~~~
psranga
You're partially right. I tried both Quicken and Money last year.

As a s/w developer, I could immediately see that Money was suffering from
years of neglect. I predicted that it would soon be cancelled and that was one
of the reasons I stuck with Quicken (though it too sucks).

Due to the reasons you articulate re: Money's early web focus and my hunch
about years of neglect, I think that Money's cancellation had much more to do
with internal Microsoft priorities than with the rise of the web finance
software companies.

For financial information, I want multi-decade records. With a web startup, I
have no assurance that all the time I spend entering and categorizing stuff
will pay off if the web guy goes under with my data. With a desktop program,
at least I can keep going on for a long time with the old version (I'm still
using Quicken 2007).

~~~
niels_olson
>For financial information, I want multi-decade records.

My wife and I have been recording our family finances in MS Money since
January 2003. Maybe we hit a sweet spot with Money 2004 but we never saw a
compelling reason to upgrade. I have an uncle who similarly is currently using
Quicken from something rediculous, like 1999. The value of the records now,
the ability to look back at how various changes (births, moves, Katrina, etc)
affected our savings and spending has been unbelievably helpful not only in
terms of making informed decisions about the future, but also preventing
fights about finances.

As an aside, the other major source of friction has historically revolved
around schedules, and Google Calendar is awesome for that. A very useful
decision, I think, was giving each other write permission to each others
schedules.

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TallGuyShort
>> they want widgety, simple applications that do one thing well.

Oh my - THAT is a familiar phrase! I think as the general population become
more tech-savvy and networking becomes vastly more important, that philosophy
will be a big deal. Go UNIX!

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maukdaddy
Um what does simple, widgety applications have to do with UNIX?

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dhs
From: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy>

Doug McIlroy, the inventor of Unix pipes and one of the founders of the Unix
tradition, summarized the philosophy as follows:

This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams,
because that is a universal interface.

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nopassrecover
I used to work in a software store in Australia and we had people always
looking for Money but the latest version was 2005 and never developed beyond
then.

