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What industry secret are you aware of that most people aren't?
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There is no financial motive for software to work well. The people who sign the check for it almost never have to use it.
I don't really get this point. Of course there's a financial motive for a lot of software to work well. There are many niches of software that are competitive, so there's a very clear incentive to make your product work better than the competition.
Of course there are cases in which there's a de-facto monopoly or customers are locked in to a particular offering for whatever reason, but it's not like that applies to all software.
I support accounting professionals using one of perhaps four or five highly complex pieces of software that handles individual, corp, trust, and other misc tax forms
The churn rate is very low YoY, because it’s what they know. They have the freedom to move their data, and we will help them to the extent possible, but at most they’ll get a subset of client data and lose the ability to query agai t prior year datasets, etc.
They’re not locked in, but between 10/15 and, say, 2/15 is a damn short time to implement and learn a new piece of software with that level of complexity.
Interestingly, I’ve never seen a long-standing calculation bug in the program. The overwhelming majority of support is d/t user error or data entry error. From that standpoint, there is of course a financial incentive for it to work well - arithmetic errors would be unacceptable - but in terms of UI/UX, no one cares and if anything were improved folks would just whine about the change anyway - even if it made their life easier
Not a CPA/not your CPA, just a software guy who got lucky enough to be in the right time/place when I decided I didn’t have the energy for the startup world anymore.