Penny-wise, pound-foolish MS releases buggy Money

 Building a quality product is cheaper than building a shoddy product. The theory is that the costs of managing the problems caused by low-quality manufacturing are so high, it’s cheaper to make a quality product in the first place.

That doesn’t mean it’s cheaper to build a Lexus than a Yugo, of course, but that it would have been cheaper for Yugo to build a quality low-cost car than to build a shoddy low-cost car. Make a quality product, and your marketing costs will be lower as word-of-mouth helps sell, product returns will be lower, customer-service costs will be lower, warranty work will be lower, and so on.

In no business is this truer than in the software-development business. Technical-support costs can be so high that if you let bugs slip by you can easily wipe out the profits derived from the sale of the product you are supporting. A classic example is what Microsoft did early in November with Microsoft Money and MSN Bill Pay.

I’ve been using MS Money, an accounting program, for about 14 years, and in general I think it’s a great product. I’ve used both Money and QuickBooks (a great example of a product with unnecessarily high support costs due to poor usability design and software bugs, by the way).

I began using MS Money before it was released, while it was still in beta, and I wrote a book about it when it was first released back in 1991. This is an important point, because I can be called an “expert user,” and I’ve been paying to use MS Money for perhaps 13 years. And what Microsoft just did wiped out all the profit they made from my purchases over that period, counting the value of the six hours or so I spent on the phone, in e-mail communications and in online chat sessions. And if it happened to me, I can only assume it happened to others, too.

So what did they do? They made some changes to the interface between Microsoft Money and MSN Bill Pay – the Web-based bill-payment system through which MS Money communicates to banks – without adequately testing those changes. They ended up releasing a serious bug.

I still don’t understand the full picture, but I do know that when you try to set up an account to communicate online, MS Money may create a duplicate account. When it does, you end up with two accounts, the original with all your transactions, and a new one to communicate with the bank via MSN Bill Pay. And from then on, your accounts diverge, and will not contain the same, correct balances.

You can try to merge the accounts; in fact the software even tells you to do so. But if you do, the merge may not work properly, and you may end up losing years of transactions. Or perhaps the program will just crash when you try to merge (both happened to me).

How did it take so many hours to resolve this problem? If I’d known the problem and the various solutions, then it wouldn’t have taken so long, of course. If the technical support people had known the problem and the solutions, it wouldn’t have been so difficult to solve. But if you don’t know the best solution, you experiment with various things, which can lead you down the wrong alley, and actually get you into a worse position.

Anyway, suffice it to say that someone at Microsoft (or Microsoft’s partner, CheckFree, that runs the Bill pay service) screwed up. They introduced a bug into a system used by many thousands of people. That, in and of itself, isn’t so surprising. All software has bugs; they’re almost impossible to avoid.

What is remarkable is that this is such an obvious bug, any basic test scenario would have unearthed the problem. I suspect some basic changes were made to the system and nobody bothered to test because they didn’t really think there could be a problem.

Certainly, if they tested by setting up a brand-new account, with a brand-new install of MS Money, the bug would not have appeared. But any simple testing strategy would have done something else, too. It would have taken an existing MS Money installation, with existing accounts, and set up communication between those accounts and Bill Pay. At that point, the bug would have been found; it simply couldn’t have been missed.

So Microsoft saved a few thousand dollars – this basic level of testing could have been done by a single person over a couple of days. And these saved dollars cost them tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of dollars in support costs, and angered thousands of users. Microsoft, or its partner, released a Yugo, and discovered that saving upfront costs can end up being very expensive.

Peter Kent is an Internet marketing consultant in Denver. His most recent book is “Search Engine Optimization for Dummies.” He can be reached at pkent@ichannelservices.com.

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