QuickBooks-Blog

Kill Public Broadcasting!

Please help us Kill Public Broadcasting. Public radio and TV supporters should pay for what they get. Taxes should not finance liberal propaganda OR conservative propaganda, especially when we have a massive federal deficit ($1.65 trillion, 40% of government spending).

There is now a major effort in Congress to Kill Public Broadcasting (government funding for public broadcasting). This has nothing to do with public broadcasting stations losing licenses or private money. Kill Public Broadcasting only deals with a very reasonable American ideal: taxes and deficit spending should not finance liberal propaganda OR conservative propaganda.

Public broadcasting supporters have many sites to help tell Congress not to Kill Public Broadcasting. I could not find any site for those who want to email, call or write Congress, asking them to Kill Public Broadcasting. This is probably because it already seems likely that Kill Public Broadcasting proponents will win.

You can make sure of this if you click here for my Kill Public Broadcasting site. It will only take you a few seconds to send Congress your petition to Kill Public Broadcasting, even if you add to or change what I said.
 

Intuit Will Kill QuickBooks Hosting Companies

Intuit QuickBooks Commercial Hosting program documents show that Intuit will kill QuickBooks hosting companies. Its new product now confirms this. 

Intuit strongly supported QuickBooks hosting for 13 years. I saw this as a long-time friend of Intuit CEOs and top managers. Intuit asked the first ProSeries (TurboTax Professional) Advisory Council members what we would do if we ran ProSeries. I said bundle QuickBooks, ProSeries and other programs with remote terminal server hosting. Programs seem to run as fast on a remote server as on local file server. ProSeries QuickBooks imports ran faster. File servers transfer chunks of QB data across networks, so local computers can process it with local QB programs. The QB network program minimizes such transfers, but programs like Microsoft Terminal Services and Citrix do this far better. They keep data and programs on a remote computer and only transfer keystrokes, screen changes and printer data.

None of thirty top ProSeries managers disagreed. Fifteen Council members made this their second choice, among almost as many options. The next day an Intuit manager discussed this endlessly, while giving three of my hosting company executives and I a long ProSeries tour. He called it, "A whale of an opportunity for Intuit," especially for multi-office tax preparers.

I wrote 7,000+ posts about QuickBooks, in news groups and forums, in a few years. Brad Smith, Intuit CEO, gave me the first outsider blog on an Intuit site. You sign nondisclosure agreements for advisory councils and beta tests, so I drafted a QuickBooks hosting article and emailed it to Brad. He always quickly replied to my advance posts with something like, "You do not have to send me anything in advance. We trust your judgment." Based on this, I used and wrote extensively about QuickBooks hosting for years, without Intuit objection. This led to many new QuickBooks hosting companies, so there were soon around a thousand such companies. Please note that QuickBooks Pro and QuickBooks Premier have long run perfectly under QuickBooks hosting, though Intuit only supports QuickBooks Enterprise for it.

I often wrote about the QuickBooks license agreement provision prohibiting shared computer use, but Intuit did nothing about it. Intuit also initially licensed only two companies for QuickBooks hosting. Its beta tests, like all other beta test for many companies I have long known, require a secrecy pledge. However, Intuit gave these so-called hosting beta test participants a very unfair monopoly advantage, by letting them advertise and promote their exclusive status. It later gave them a further ridiculous monopoly advantage, by letting them rent QuickBooks at very favorable rates. This caused increasing friction between my Intuit friends and me over QuickBooks hosting.

Intuit finally opened its QuickBooks Commercial Hosting program around 18 months ago. The related documents made it clear that Intuit will kill QuickBooks hosting companies. It was immediately obvious that almost no QuickBooks hosting company could meet the security and financial requirements for licensed QuickBooks hosting. It would outrage QuickBooks users if Intuit insisted they have the security requirements and costs that Intuit demands from commercial hosting companies. It is especially outrageous that these requirements do not apply to clients of QuickBooks hosting accountants, though anyone can be an accountant's client for hosting only.

The QuickBooks hosting license made it especially clear that Intuit will kill QuickBooks hosting companies. I have never found anyone who did not express outrage when they learned about this. It requires applicants to disclose ALL confidential financial, security and customer information. This does not obligate Intuit to accept applicants meeting any standard. Intuit also reserves the right to compete against applicants and make their information public. To me, this was a death sentence. Such provisions insure that Intuit can increase fees until they get almost all QuickBooks hosting profits. They also suggest that Intuit would soon kill QuickBooks hosting companies with a competing offering. It is now clear that Intuit always intended to do exactly that.

What makes this completely disgusting is that Intuit will even kill QuickBooks hosting companies that recently joined its commercial hosting program. Most of these nine companies (details to follow) paid an extra $18,000 for the first year and $5,000 for later years, PLUS $5 per user per month. That made them non-competitive with the thousand unlicensed QuickBooks hosting companies and with to accountants hosting QuickBooks clients. Intuit insisted on these extra fees know that it would soon kill these QuickBooks hosting companies.

Intuit will kill QuickBooks hosting companies with a new product. Method Integration has long let users enter data in its programmable web forms. Method then synchronizes this data with QuickBooks. It seemed obvious to me that this would let Intuit create a product that would synchronize data between separate QuickBooks data files. We now know that this product will be QuickBooks Shared Books. It looks like it is already undergoing final testing. It may only synchronize two files at first, but there is no reason it cannot soon synchronize many files. This is inherently far more efficient and less costly, compared to terminal server type QuickBooks hosting. Only those needing the immediate updates, from other users, will not quickly use it (subject to Intuit monopoly pricing).

This probably means Intuit will soon kill around 80% of QuickBooks hosting company revenue and a far larger percentage of QuickBooks hosting companies. Intuit adopted 10 operating values in 1993. I long championed Intuit because it really lived up to its #1 Operating Value:

Integrity Without Compromise

Intuit is built on integrity. In all we do, we maintain the highest standards, never approaching what could be considered questionable behavior. On this, we never compromise.

Having integrity means more to us than simply the absence of deception. It means we are completely forthright in all our dealings. We say what needs to be said, not simply what people want to hear.

Integrity builds trust. Only through trust do successful, long-term working relationships flourish.

Intuit CEO Brad Smith, a former close friend (You're fantastic Mike. Absolutely fantastic!). However, his lack of foresight led to the longest web downtime, for a million plus users. He relied on one data center in earthquake country, without adequate power, backup or replication.

Brad also seems to have lost his integrity. How else can you explain reversing 13 years of QuickBooks hosting support and extorting QuickBooks extra hosting fees, knowing Intuit will kill QuickBooks hosting companies and millions in third-world service provider revenue? How else can you explain Intuit placing short-term profits ahead of the values that made it great, while knowingly wasting a billion dollars a year for QuickBooks users? How else can you explain Intuit screwing employees, by colluding on non-solicitation, in violation of monopoly laws?

Finally, how else can you explain many top Intuit people fired, while Senior VP Jill Ward remains, after threatening to cut off my paid QuickBooks ProAdvisor support for doing what the former Intuit CEO wrote I should do (Keep raising hell when Intuit does something wrong)? This is especially tragic since Jill once hugged the heck out of me, but later reversed this Intuit Advisory Council and repeated top management decision. It also is tragic because Jill threatened me over disclosing information about QuickBooks hosting. The non-disclosure forms required from my ProSeries hosting company tour friends, plus Brad's later approval of my posts, had long since placed all my knowledge about this in the public domain. 

On the other hand, Jill once lectured me over my refusing to help someone without an apology to Intuit.

Unions Kill Profits, Unions Kill Jobs

For more on this and related Heritage Foundation posts, please view them online. Due to my http://www.QuickBooks-Blog.com/ SEO changes,  a day after release Google had this post as #1 of 6,800,000 links for Unions Kill Profits Jobs. Thanks to  http://danielstoica.com/ (http://twitter.com/danielstoicatax), Google also had this post as #2 and #3 of 12,600,000 links for Unions Kill Profits.

Andy Stern's America

Last night, Politico reported that Service Employees International Union President Andrew Stern is expected to resign and, according to The New York Times, the resignation is about to happen very soon. If Stern does resign, he will be doing so while at the top of his game. Stern told The Las Vegas Sun last year: "We spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama - $60.7 million to be exact - and we're proud of it." President Obama is well aware of his huge debt to the SEIU. That is why he admits in his autobiography, "I owe those unions." And it also explains why Stern is the most frequent Obama White House visitor, according to official visitor logs.

Stern's access to President Obama has already paid huge dividends including: an $862 billion stimulus that prevented states from having to cut-back government union jobs or wages; $2.5 trillion in new government health care spending, much of which will go to unionized health care providers; andthe appointment of SEIU associate general counsel Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board. The NYTdescribes the SEIU under Stern's tenure as "the nation’s most politically active union, with 1.9 million members." The marriage of politics to union organizing has been great for SEIU membership, making it the fastest-growing union in America.

But what has been great for SEIU's membership rolls has not been good for the SEIU's bottom line. Growing union membership through politics is expensive. The Wall Street Journal reports that as recently as 2002, total SEIU liabilities were about $8 million. But by 2008, the union owed more than $156 million, a 30% increase over the $120 million it owed in 2007. And make no mistake, lobbying government is where Stern believes the future of SEIU is. After President Obama's election, SEIU fired 75 national field staff and organizers so that the SEIU could "reallocate resources ... to lobbying and communications in Washington."

In fact, taking a more critical look at SEIU's recent growth, The Washington Post reports: "some of its biggest gains in recent years were less the result of shoe-leather organizing and more the result of deals with major employers or politicians -- including former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich." Specifically,Blagojevich signed a state law handing over 49,000 state child care workers to SEIU local 880, which is run by the notorious community organizing group ACORN. The deal nearly tripled SEIU 880’s income from $7 million in 2005 to $21 million in 2007. This came after SEIU’s Illinois Political Action Committee gave Gov. Blagojevich $908,000, making it the single largest campaign contributor for his re-election campaign.

It is no coincidence that under Stern's tenure the number of government union members surpassed the number of private sector union members for the first time in our nation's history. There are two reasons for this: 1) Unions kill private sector jobs, and unionized companies earn profits 15% lower than those of comparable non-union firms. This makes unionized firms less competitive, which is why unionized manufacturing jobs fell 75% between 1977 and 2008, while non-union manufacturing INCREASED 6% over that same time. 2) Government union jobs face no competition. Public sector unionization has exploded in the past decade as leaders like Stern realized politics paid much better than the free market.Under Stern's leadership, SEIU has become the nation's second largest government union with over half of its membership drawing a paycheck on the taxpayers dime.

Explaining how organized labor really works, US Court of Appeals judge for the 7th Circuit Richard Posner recently wrote:

The goal of unions is to redistribute wealth from the owners and managers of firms, and from workers willing to work for very low wages, to the unionized workers and the union’s officers. … Unions, in other words, are worker cartels. … There is also a long history of union corruption. And some union activity is extortionate: the union and the employer tacitly agree that as long as the employer gives the workers a wage increase slightly above the union dues, the union will leave the employer alone.

Except that in Stern's America, union management no longer redistribute wealth from firms to union members. With the majority of union members now working for the government, Andy Stern and his cohorts are extorting money from you, the taxpayer. And where is that money going? Not into shoring up union member pensions. Those are woefully underfunded. No, the Andy Sterns of the world turn around and use their taxpayer-funded government union dues to lobby for an even larger government that can pay for even more government union jobs. Andy Stern's America is a perpetual government dependency machine.

And don't think for a second that Stern's retirement means he is gone for good. Stern is still a proud member of President Obama's deficit commission. Complete reliance on government growth, crippling debt, and Blagojevich-style corruption. That is what Andy Stern did to the SEIU, and it is what Stern and President Obama will do to this country.

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