I've read some interviews with the CEO of Intuit, and also some market info which leads me to believe that more and more of these desktop software apps will disappear in favor of the central online SAAS web apps.
It is easier and cheaper to support the online version compared to the support, distribution, etc for the "package"
I use both of the desktop apps - Quicken & Turbo Tax -
Not sure how I would like to have all my "stuff" online and only available via an Internet connection. And we've all seen the steps taken already to divorce Quicken from any outside financial resources... and basically bring it "inhouse". Unfortunately, there have totally wrecked the online mirror in the process, SO - I'm not so sure I really want to migrate over to the "online only" world, but it might not be a choice in the near future.
Not the only choice, you have pencil, paper and calculator. It worked for generations prior to Intuit and will continue to work in the foreseeable future.
In the not so distant past, all applications and data resided on central computers. Users only had dumb terminals that could access the applications and the data. It worked very well. The hardware was robust and redundant. Data security was much less of an issue. Backups were reliably performed by professionals as opposed to the ad-hoc methods used by home PC users. All in all, it was good enough to reliably run the Fortune 500 businesses, and still is.
Alternatively, the application could reside on a distant network, while it is loaded and runs on your local PC, with all of your data residing locally.
I've used, serviced, developed, and supported systems that worked both ways. They worked very well, with high reliability and availability. They ran with much more reliable hardware, and the latest versions of software with rapid deployment of updates. Overall, they suffered far less problems than we currently have with individual PCs.
As far as "my" data being out there in the world, well, it already is. The IRS has all of my tax data. My brokerage has all of my brokerage data. My bank has all of my banking data. My pension and health care providers have all of that data. Even my shopping data is in a database owned by Safeway, Amazon, and others. Their data is the "official" version, and all I've got is a copy.
Businesses used to have huge bullpen offices filled with accountants, wearing green eye-shades and arm bands.
People used to cook over an open fire, and haul water up from the stream. They used to tell time by the position of the Sun. Books were written by hand, and read by few. I don't think I want to go back to the good old days.
Yes, it is distributed around the world but if Quicken and TTAX go with these Internet based products ALL of our information will be on ONE server farm, which scares the heck out of me. Can you imagine these servers being compromised knowing ALL of your personal and financial information is in the hands criminals?
e-gad... I will go back to paper an pencil and check writing.... or maybe wait for the inevitable and then sue the heck our of Intuit and then not have to worry about managing my money as I can hire someone to do this for me. :-)
The bigger problem is you will have to pay monthly fees to use it. When the software goes SAAS I'll go back to making my own spreadheets. At least that way I only have what I want, NO BLOAT.
Only because those 3270 and 5250 terminals (and their close brethren) could connect only to the company's mainframe, or more correctly, the front-end. SNA was never designed to work in a distributed environment and IBM eventually got out of the networking business. I don't think that LU 6.2, APPN, etc could have successfully competed against the evolving Internet once it became available for commercial usage.
Gosh, I remember many system failures. Are we both talking about the same System/360 and /370?
Only because the entire "usage model" was so different. There were still problems with employees who installed "trap doors" in their in-house programs, and users who were careless with passwords.
Good enough for a very different way of doing business than today. Yes, mainframes are still very good transaction processing machines, but no way would I ever go back to "runoff," "troff" or any other host-based word processing system. etc., etc., etc.
And no way do I want to go back to data entry via card punches or even the floppy-disk-based replacements.
I used to fix the S/360 and S/370 back in the 1960's and 1970's. One of my customers was a big insurance company in NYC. They measured system outages in great detail. They had well over 99% availability for months at a time, to a wide network of agents throughout the country. There were certainly software and hardware failures, but the redundancy of the systems provided very high reliability. In more recent years, enterprise level hardware runs for months and even years at a time without an outage.
Yes, no system is completely "fool proof". However, with nightly, weekly, and monthly backups, lost data was rarely ever a problem.
In the last decade of my career, we were network based. Major applications and data storage were provided by remote systems. Many other applications were installed locally. I used MS Office which was installed locally, but the document files were not. I kept very little data on my local machine. I ran other applications from many other machines, all seamlessly integrated. They all ran exactly like they were local to my machine. We had occasional outages, when the servers were not available, but those were just a few afternoons a year.
As a multi-platform software developer, I also had windows open to as many as a dozen different machines (Sun, HP, Linux, AIX, SCO Unix, the BlueGene supercomputer, and even Linux/390, VM and OS/390 on ESA/390 systems) for compiling and testing my programs. Those machines were found all around the world, including England, Germany, India, and China. All of it ran together, seamlessly, using files that resided on the one set of servers in San Jose and Boulder. All of the machines shared the same data and program source. The same servers provided login security for all of the machines. If I made a mistake and deleted a file, I could recall yesterdays or even last months backup in about 15 minutes.
That kind of robustness costs lots and lots of money. My university computing center obviously did not have that kind of money, at least not for academic computing. (The administrative computing was on a different system.)
I am in complete agreement with you that backup on local systems is the big weakness in the PC usage model. However, I worked for systems manufacturer that shall remain nameless "The boss" wanted everyone to use what amounted to a diskless workstation with a clever name, but was really just a warmed over 3270. People hated them. They wanted local storage. The remote storage model breaks down for people who have to travel, take their work home, etc., etc.
The problem with IT is that goes through wave after wave of the "trend du jour." Right now, it's SAAS. Sounds a lot like 1970s era time-sharing to me. The market research company Gartner even has a term for this: hype cycle.
All totally irrelevent, as mentioned above, paper and pencil may be the only available choice if you don't want your financials available to any hacker...
There's another consideration: competition is not limited to some artificially created "business category" (a mistake made by too many).
Planes, trains, buses, rickshaws, bicycles, and walking (among others) ... are all potential competition for the automobile ... depending on costs, and user desires.
If the suppliers of automobiles can't provide a better (more cost effective) alternative to any of the other means of transportation ... people will reject automobiles for one, or more, of the alternatives ... including walking.
That fact doesn't assume that users would prefer to walk to work: just that they will walk to work if that is a better deal than other deals they have access to.
If the suppliers of personal financial software and the suppliers of spreadsheets, etc; fail to adequately account for users desires and pocketbooks ... there are always alternatives customers can turn to ... including paper and pencil.
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