I was recently on the eettf.net blog when I found this video. When a large corporation such as Microsoft tries to appeal to the masses, this is the outcome:

I thought this was a joke, but it is actually real:

Microsoft Songsmith

This is, regrettably the outcome of a company who is good at one thing, trying to compete with companies who are good at similar things, but have a different market audience.

I assume this is something they thought could compete with easy to use software from companies such as Apple.

I am tempted to say, this is terrible. It is a ridiculous idea. But what if Apple were to make something similar, first, hype it up and target it differently to their customers, with say a tie in to itunes and the ipod? It could work. But that’s because they would make it for their target audience. I think the problem here is that Microsoft is targetting someone else’s target market. They need to establish a presence in that target market first, which they haven’t done.

Microsoft is really good at Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows. They should really stick to that, improving it so it works well and is more useful. And perhaps create software you can plug in to it, which is useful.

We export our bank statements from internet banking to our accounting software Xero every few days.

However, after experiencing some issues with double ups in transaction information I looked into the problem further to try and figure out what was going on.

It quickly became obvious what the problem was:

-If you view or export statements for a period that includes a weekend, say Friday - Sunday, you will see all transactions that occurred during that time.

-But as any transactions that happen during a weekend are not processed until a weekday, when you view or export statements for the start of the week - say Monday to Wednesday - it will show all the transactions that actually occurred during the previous Saturday and Sunday.

The results of this is that if you export for say Friday - Sunday, then export your bank statements for the following Monday - Wednesday, all the transactions that happened on Saturday - Sunday will appear twice.

Thus stuffing up your accounting.

This sort of error highlights the problems with poor web based software testing.

Export in one lot for Friday - Wednesday and you don’t experience the problem.

For a bank, this sort of basic error is avoidable and unacceptable. Next time you’re using internet banking, be sure to check that your transactions are being processed correctly!

Just because internet banking is secure, doesn’t mean the person writing the software that makes it work has covered all bases.

It seems as though Telecom Xtra has made another, more significant than normal anti-competitive action by requiring all its customers to record into the Yahoo! Xtra e-mail system any e-mail addresses they use for their business.

So, if you have a professional e-mail address for your business, which is a service not provided by Xtra, you must now log all these e-mail addresses into Xtra’s system.

Under the guise of “Online Identity Theft Protection” or some such thing, Xtra has made it a requirement that in order to send e-mails from your business e-mail account, if your internet connection has been provided by Xtra you must log any e-mail addresses you intend to use, with the Xtra service.

At the same time, Xtra has announced plans for a stronger push into the business market, offering customers the ability to do all their business e-mail hosting and web hosting through Xtra.

Now, as Xtra will now know all e-mail addresses for all their customers, they can easily promote to them the “benefits” of changing their web hosting and e-mail services to Xtra.

Xtra now blocks, as standard, 50% of our services as a web and e-mail hosting services provider. Our customers must send all e-mails through the Xtra service, rather than our service. When a problem occurs with sending e-mail, our customers should be able to call us to resolve this. Rather, we have to send them on to the Xtra “Help”-desk, in order to get the issue resolved. Their enquiries are frequently sent overseas to people who have not been trained correctly, therefore the issue is sent back to us to resolve - which we can’t resolve as it’s not our service.

Needless to say, Xtra is limiting what its customers can do and restricting their ability to easily use a provider other than Xtra for their e-mail services.

In the interests of our customers, our interests, and the interests of other providers in the marketplace, we have lodged a formal complaint with the Commerce Commission in regards to what we see as being anti-competitive behaviour by Telecom in this matter. Watch this space for some action over this monopolistic behaviour in the future.