FWIW, I got to see the 'split brain' product team when Sun Micro decided to do a 386 based workstation and had the east coast team design the system software. Between their Systems Group and the west coast Systems Group much confusion was created.
On the product, I'm not interested in a 'free' product, I'd pay you $300 for such a product and buy periodic updates for $100/year. I tend to do this will all 'tools' type applications (Illustration, CAD, Simulation, Etc.) I love having the company invested in making it something wonderful and open source products with their, by necessity, indiscriminate addition of developers, suffer for that reason[1].
My concern, especially with financial software, is that your cloud gets compromised and I and all of your customers are scrambling to avoid losses. Frankly I am amazed that people can get liability insurance for that sort of thing given the stakes!
That said, Quicken and Intuit in general, really needs competition to help them focus.
Edit: And per the summary comment. I am not suggesting a 'freemium' or ad supported model, just one that keeps the data where I can be assured that if someone else let's their guard down it won't compromise my data. That is the big weakness with 'cloud' in my mind.
[1] FreeBSD tries really really hard and comes close, I expect it would really shine if it had a revenue stream to support a full time product management team and lead developers.
Ah sorry, I thought by "not a subscription" you just meant free.
What you're saying makes sense and is definitely something worth thinking about. We do take security very seriously, of course, but I understand your concern about data still living in the cloud.
On the product, I'm not interested in a 'free' product, I'd pay you $300 for such a product and buy periodic updates for $100/year. I tend to do this will all 'tools' type applications (Illustration, CAD, Simulation, Etc.) I love having the company invested in making it something wonderful and open source products with their, by necessity, indiscriminate addition of developers, suffer for that reason[1].
My concern, especially with financial software, is that your cloud gets compromised and I and all of your customers are scrambling to avoid losses. Frankly I am amazed that people can get liability insurance for that sort of thing given the stakes!
That said, Quicken and Intuit in general, really needs competition to help them focus.
Edit: And per the summary comment. I am not suggesting a 'freemium' or ad supported model, just one that keeps the data where I can be assured that if someone else let's their guard down it won't compromise my data. That is the big weakness with 'cloud' in my mind.
[1] FreeBSD tries really really hard and comes close, I expect it would really shine if it had a revenue stream to support a full time product management team and lead developers.