Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
What's the benefit of casting off one proprietary embrace for another? That would seem to be the question one should ask in view of the offer from Intuit to discount its Quicken money management software for those who plan to move from Microsoft Money.
It may be recalled that Microsoft recently announced that it would be not be selling its personal finance and small business package Money from June 30 this year.
Intuit has leapt at the marketing opportunity and has offered customers a discount if they switch to its applications before July 31. Of course, it's not clear whether these discounts apply worldwide.
What about all your old data? Intuit says it has been working with Microsoft on a method of file conversion to make the moving of your data painless - but at the moment, that's limited to 10,000 transactions.
The company also says that it expects to have a solution for transferring all one's files from Money to Quicken. A method of data conversion has been provided.
But what's the guarantee that Quicken won't suffer the same fate as Money? Well, Intuit says it has been around for more than 25 years and serves about 12 million households.
Would you be satisfied with that? Remember, Microsoft has been in business for longer and serves considerably more households - that did not stop the company from calling a halt to Money.
As soon as the product became a drag on the bottomline, it was jettisoned. What happens if the same fate befalls Intuit?
Remember, the Quicken file format isn't open either - switching to a close application is just delaying the inevitable. Also, one must bear in mind that Quicken changed file formats in 2004, creating a lot of misery for its users.
With every application that does not use open formats for storing data, one is just putting one's own personal data at risk. The pain will come sooner or later. But it will come, count on that.
I'm sure that some bright spark will work out a way to convert Intuit's proprietary formats and make a packet off it if the company, God forbid, disappears. America is full of such hucksters.
But with Intuit or Microsoft, it's all the same - one is merely putting off the inevitable. This isn't a case of waiting for Godot - a day of reckoning will arrive. Nobody ever thought GM would go into bankrupcty, did they?
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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