from the editor of aseidman.com

Software Companies Should Kill the Cubicle

Posted by Ariel Seidman | January 31, 2008

Cubicles are the ultimate form of a poor compromise. Lets consider the two reasonable extremes of providing a working environment for employees. On the one hand you can go with the bullpen approach or you can go with offices. Somebody must have said, well if we just built walls around these desks then we would have the best of both worlds (lots of bad products get developed with this type of thinking). We would have the privacy of an office as well as the open and egalitarian benefits of the bullpen. Nothing could be further from the reality as cubicles

1. provide a false sense of privacy — you can’t make a private call from your cube.
2. generate just as many distractions as a bullpen environment as you can hear every conversation.
3. rarely provide the upside associated with the bullpen model where ideas can flow quickly and people have the latest information required to make good decisions.

I have no doubt that technology companies and especially those companies whose success relies on developing code cubicles are a significant drain on productivity and general employee satisfaction. Rather, a better model would provide employees (especially software developers, product managers, qa, etc.) with a small office and in the center of the floor provide an ad-hoc meeting places (not conference rooms that you need to reserve) with Wi-Fi (of-course), refreshments, etc. where employees could congregate around if they need to ideate, exchange information, etc.

Is the End Near for Quicken and Microsoft Money?

Posted by Ariel Seidman | January 10, 2008

In the fall, the personal finance software space — led primarily by Mint.com (which did a superb execution job for a V1 product) and Wesabe was all the rage. Its clear that this space was due for a refresh and had grown stale as both Intuit and Microsoft starved their products for too long creating an opening for the likes of Mint and Wesabe, but its too early to write the eulogy for Quicken and Microsoft Money as Omar and others suggest.

It will be a few years before we can declare any winners in this space — but there are three questions that the likes of Mint and Wesabe need to answer in order to be considered long-term viable competitors?

First, do Mint.com and Wesabe investors have the patience that is needed to fight this out over the long-term? Building a loyal user base in this space will take time as even the early adopters will only dip their toe before committing significant financial data to these services as they want to be certain that these services are committed to privacy and security but perhaps as importantly that their built for the long haul. Nobody wants to wake up two years from now reading an email that they are shutting down and moving all of your data to ACME Financial Service Inc.

Secondly, can they expand the set of users in the personal finance market beyond the Quicken and Microsoft Money base? The personal finance software market is relatively small as the effort to reward curve is steep — your forced to spend lots of time and energy setting up Quicken or Money before you start to see its benefits which only works for a small and dedicated set of the market.

Finally, can they broaden the value proposition beyond simply providing a 360 degree view of your spending and wrapping it in a slick user interface? Sexy pie-charts are interesting for all of 3 minutes, but what will keep people engaged?� The savings trick employed by Mint is a good start, but from my short experience with it not super helpful (i.e. it’s an execution problem).

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