Wednesday, August 20, 2008

When is a brand name misleading?

As I was waiting for the latest version of QuickBooks to load. I was pondering if a product name can be deemed misleading under the Australian trade practices act?

All I needed to do was fill out an entry in my timesheet, it was only a 15 minute entry, just to mark the time I have spent on the phone with a client. If I had used pen and paper this would have taken mere seconds to record, I dare say I could have tallied up all the entries and updated the weekly total in less than a minute too. Which leads me to the problem with the name QuickBooks, surely it should be reasonable to expect the some aspect of it is Quick, certainly quicker than the technology it replaces ie pen & paper.

But no. QuickBooks is not quick, not in anything I need to use if for... It took 5 minutes to finish loading to a point where I could enter my time information. 5 minutes ... ah the wise ones say, why don't you just leave it running all the time? Obviously not that wise are they?, it hogs so much memory and slows the system down ... again "SlowBooks" is more apt than "QuickBooks"

At the moment we have opted to run a second machine just so that QuickBooks (or SlowBeast) can be reasonably on-call as needed. Perhaps the Open Source community should target this market in the same way that OpenOffice did. or maybe Google? I'm ready to use GBooks now .. where do I sign up?

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