Duane Gran’s log of thoughts

In the past week we have witnessed serious perturbations in the marketplace. It can shake the confidence of even the most planned investor, but I offer up the following words of advice from Warren Buffet:

Our stay-put behavior reflects our view that the stock market serves as a relocation center at which money is moved from the active to the patient.

I’ve used Quicken for ages to organize (or at the very least categorize) personal financial transactions. Today I learned that Intuit will rewrite the application for the Mac. The application is a bit long in the tooth, but this announcement gives me little comfort and this may well be the best news possible for Intuit’s competitors. Why, you may ask?

A software rewrite is almost always a bad idea that percolates up from the development team and eventually makes it way into the ear of management. The typical explanation goes that we, the programmers, are spending so much time supporting the idiosyncracies of the old system that a fresh code base is required to get it right. Probably the best explanation for why this is folly comes by way of Joel Spotsky:

The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it.

I have a hunch that I’m like most people who value reliability and a seamless upgrade in my next version of Quicken. The last question on my mind is whether they wrote the application with the Carbon or Cocoa API. I’ll let other people take that plunge, thank you.