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The point about Quickbook being hard to use as a barrier of entry is correct. It is indeed a feature once Quickbook is already widely used. On the other hand,
by noobhacker 9y ago
The point about Quickbook being hard to use as a barrier of entry is correct. It is indeed a feature once Quickbook is already widely used.
On the other hand, should we intentionally make a software product that's hard to use? How does it get off the ground to the point of being widely used in the first place?
- curun1r 9y agoI completely agree. The observation is less useful when looking at how Quickbooks is/was built and more useful from the viewpoint of building a Quickbooks competitor. Just fixing broken UI interaction patterns isn't going to be successful. If you want to beat Quickbooks, you need to either replace the accountants that small businesses use entirely or offer those accountants a significantly better value proposition than Intuit does. Because what they have now is working and their livelihoods depend on it. They have processes in place that are built around Quickbooks. The status quo works, so you almost need to be revolutionarily better to overcome that level of friction.
- bluedino 9y agoQuickbooks is marketed as being easy to use! And it is, have you ever used some old crappy accounting software? When software like Quickbooks first came out, your other options for a small business were complicated programs like ACCPAC or stuff that only ran on larger systems like IBM’s. A nice GUI lets you use the mouse and the other parts of Windows/PC that you already know instead of a cryptic keyboard driven character-based interface.