Coding In Paradise

I've been a huge fan of Turbotax for years, including it's maker Intuit. I've always considered Intuit a master at making customer-friendly and usable software, and putting the end-user first. I've used the online Turbotax to file my returns for about the last decade, always happy with the result.

This is why I was especially surprised this year to see what must basically be price-gouging by Intuit. In years past I ran my own business and therefore paid for a much higher priced option. Now that I no longer work for myself I need to use a lower-priced version (the price difference is significant). Turbotax and Intuit give you a way to _upgrade_, but no way to downgrade. In fact, you have to literally delete your account and create a new one (with none of your years of tax return info carried over) in order to choose a lower priced Turbotax option. Here is their official answer in the help section:

"Can I Switch Back to a Lower-Priced TurboTax Online?
Updated: 1/22/2009
Article ID: 2659

Once you've started preparing your tax return with TurboTax Online, you can upgrade your TurboTax Online product to Deluxe, Home & Business or Premier to take advantage of the extra features and tax guidance available in those products. After you've upgraded to one of these versions, your tax information will transfer to the upgraded version automatically. However, to switch back to a lower-priced version, you'll need to start a new return with a different User ID, as there is no option to switchback to the previous version once you have upgraded your product.

Important: If you decide to start over in a new return with a different User ID, you will not be able to transfer previous year's returns over to the new account."

This is so a conscious price gouge. Especially in this economy where folks job situation can change it's especially surprising.

Congratulations Intuit! You've turned a loyal decade-long customer into someone now looking for other options. Yes, I'm going to pay the higher price this time because I don't want to lose my data and am running out of time around my taxes, but don't expect to see me around next year. I tend to be a pretty loyal customer, but this is so blatant that it surprised me.

Has anyone else run into these issues?

One of the great aspects of working with the SVG community has been meeting some of the cool folks inside of it. I got a chance to meet one of these people, Doug Schepers, recently. Doug is great and alot of fun. He got involved with SVG a few years ago and then spent thousands of dollars out of his own pocket in order to join the W3C as an individual and influence its direction in a positive way. Now he is fully helping to define and steward SVG as a W3C Member, such as with the recent CSS + SVG work going on to use CSS in order to apply SVG effects that Safari submitted.

Doug is like the posse for SVG, making sure it goes in good directions. This inspired me to mockup that SVG has a posse, with Doug's image:



I wrote it in SVG of course, using Inkscape. Click through it to see the SVG file. This is of course based on the famous Andre the Giant Has a Posse posters by Shepard Fairey.

Labels: svg

So Moved - And the Pursuit of Happiness Blog - NYTimes.com: "The 4th biggest city in Brazil, 2.5 million strong, votes by direct ballot on the city budget. The city provides training and the budget process and some tens of thousands participate. As a result they've eliminated hunger and illiteracy. Why not NYC and Omaha and LA. Let's get busy and spread the word. And just in case you're skeptical, keep in mind that the idea of electing leaders would have seemed quite absurd not all that long ago in history!"

Absolutely fabulous graphical blog entry on that page as well.

Ajaxian: 3D APIs are coming to the Web in force: "...it's completely silly to say that browser vendors have given up on advancing the open web through standards. For one, they're doing that in W3C right now, but what they do in TKG and in a number of other places (e.g. OMTP) - just because you haven't heard of them doesn't mean they're not building standards - is also that. The open web is being advanced through standards more now than ever, and I think we've now more or less figured out the experiment-specify loop in a way that makes the ancient innovation vs standardization debate antiquated."

Garfield: 'Chaos Scenario' Has Arrived for Media, Marketing - Advertising Age - News: "For sheer poignancy, though, it's hard to beat The New York Times. With a $400 million May debt payment approaching like a runaway cement truck, the Times is selling 75% of its shiny new headquarters. More alarmingly, it has suspended its stock dividend and borrowed $250 million at usurious rates from Mexican oligarch Carlos Slim, whom a Times editorial not long ago condemned as a 'robber baron.' And if not Slim, who, Gazprom?"

Lots of gloom and doom these days around the newspaper industry. Here's a bit more gloom and doom for regional TV and radio.

I think we will see the death of regional TV networks soon, with probably a destabilization of the big three TV networks into a new model. I think regional radio will last a bit longer, just because most TV is consumed in the home whereas radio is consumed while mobile. Centralized broadband into the home will hasten the crumbling of regional TV, whereas the cellular networks can't stream digital radio well currently. However, the recent rapid acceleration of advanced smartphones like the iPhone, Android, etc. are accelerating the growth, speed, and general affordability of cellular data networks, making regional radio probably the third thing that will fall. As soon as we see cars that have digital radio receivers that tap into the Internet we will know the end is nigh on that front. I would expect to see them show up in high-end cars first, like the Lexus.

Here's one thing the big newspapers can do (I don't think regional TV or radio can do anything -- I think they are doomed, though they have probably 5 to 8 years):

1) Attempt to accelerate the commoditization and availability of magazine sized, full-color eInk displays. These are rapidly entering the marketplace, but color displays are probably 5 to 8 years out. If you can get the price of color down faster with a Manhattan style project, this could give you a platform necessary for high-quality ads. The tricky thing is you need to drive mass commoditization in the next 3 years, as that seems like the timeline for newspapers these days unfortunately.
2) As I mentioned above, digital cellular networks/Wifi are already falling in price pretty fast. Help spur this trend along; I predict that in 3 years digital data plans will be mainstream and quite fast.
3) The most important part: have a common billing platform and device subsidization program so that users can subscribe to newspapers on the eink devices without having to have many of them.

In all likelihood the cellular carriers themselves would become that common billing platform, doling out devices such as these. However, the carriers are kinda dinosaurs when it comes to innovations around these things unfortunately, so it will probably either be Apple or Amazon that becomes that common billing platform + device manufacturer. If only a consortium of newspapers could have made it to that point sooner...

Labels: news