Dennis DeSantis
(Disclaimer: I’m not a business analyst, but I play one on the interwebz.)
It’s fairly well-established that the once-promising budgeting and bank aggregation site Mint has become terrible. A cursory read through the Google results for “mint.com sucks” reads like a litany of first-world financial suffering – inaccessible data, inaccurate data, almost no official support, etc.
We’re used to our web experiences getting better, not worse, over time. Seemingly every day, Google releases another mind-blowing web platform that upends an entire industry. And the products are actually good, so these success stories make sense. In light of this, it’s interesting to examine the failures.
With the benefit of hindsight, some of the spectacular crashes of the first dot-com bust were hilarious. (Anyone remember flooz.com?) It was apparently possible to get venture funding for even the most self-evidently bad ideas.
But Mint is fundamentally a fantastic idea, and actually could be amazing. Early on, they rolled out a great looking and highly functional aggregation tool, and even have a seemingly reasonable revenue model: based on an analysis of your accounts, they show you offers from vendors offering competing products (and take some sort of kickback if you sign up). It was certainly good enough to kill off a number of potentially interesting competitors early on.
Then they got bought by Quicken. The rest is history. The quality of the data and support began to drop almost immediately. What never lagged, however, was development of the revenue model. Even now, at the apex of customer outrage on their official support channels, the latest update to Mint’s iPhone app introduced…partner offers.
Who’s to blame when good internet companies go bad? I have some theories:
1. The customer is to blame. Users of web platforms are quick to buy into the illusion that they’re using free products. This is a fallacy. Web platforms are free in the same sense that network television is free; you pay in time spent being exposed to advertising. In the case of Mint, this is literal advertising – you see offers from partners. In the case of Facebook, Google, etc., the payment is more subtle. It is not your eyes but rather your data that is exposed to advertising. This doesn’t cost you time up front but you can be sure that you have something that is worth money to vendors somewhere. Because we trick ourselves into believing these tools are free, we feel less entitled to quality.
Customers: resist. Web tools are a product, just like a tangible good. If they break, complain – loudly and publicly. If this doesn’t fix it, use a different tool. There are alternatives everywhere, for everything.
2. The web platform provider is to blame. Cheered on by duped users who believe they’re getting shiny internet toys for “free,” web platform providers can easily be insulated from the need to add actual value.
Web platform providers: resist. You make things. If they break, fix them. Go home at the end of the day proud of the good thing you made, not the money you made from it. Good things are more important (and, as Google should have taught you by now, lead to more money in the end anyway).
It’s not too late for Mint. Maybe they’ll get smart, start working on functionality again and fix everything they’ve neglected. But they’ll only get there if their users start voting for quality.
As you can see, my website is back online after several days of suffering, mayhem and near-random typing.
This monkey programs e-commerce plugins. (CC by pathfinderlinden )
Things that should be fixed now (but will probably still suck in other ways) include:
- Random reformatting of everything. This was, I think, my favorite part of the previous design. Menus, sidebars etc. would just magically move around the page. This would happen even without me doing any editing. It certainly kept things interesting if by “interesting” you mean “the worst thing that ever happened.”
- Store not working in Internet Explorer. For reasons which will never be known, my score store simply stopped working for customers using Internet Explorer. Browsing, cart loading, etc. all worked. Purchasing did not. This seems to be fixed now, but if you try to order something and are inadvertently charged nine hundred dollars, please let me know. (Sidenote: if there is any e-commerce platform for selling digital downloads that wasn’t designed by terrible, terrible people, I’d love to know about it. I’ve tried many solutions now and they’re all unspeakably awful. The one I’m using now is certainly not good; it’s just the least awful.)
- Utter busyness. This is no one’s fault but mine. For some reason, I decided last time around that there should be all kinds of stuff everywhere – sidebars, navigation, featured posts, kittens, etc. But then I realized that good websites stopped looking like that in the 90s, so I’m chilling out.
Don't do this.
- Notation should be considered a set of instructions for performers. And nothing else.
- Notation is not art, nor is it a program note. Perhaps most importantly, it is not music.
- Augenmusik is useless at best and destructive at worst. Baude Cordier, George Crumb and others were wrong to use it. This fact does not diminish their value as composers – only as copyists.
- The quality of a composer’s musical idea is distinct from his/her ability to notate that idea. Composers who lack the desire or technical ability to notate clearly should hire copyists.
- If an extramusical-idea-as-notation is necessary for a composer to move forward with the composition, then this version of the notation should be thought of as a draft. Upon completion, the work should be renotated to facilitate easier performance.
- Performers should not be expected to renotate music to facilitate easier performance.
- There may be extramusical reasons to provide scores to performers which cannot be played. But there are no musical reasons to do so. Performers who receive such a score should expect/request a corrected version.
- If there is a simpler way to notate a given idea, then that is the correct way. There are no exceptions.
- Certain instruments – in particular, most percussion instruments – do not sustain. Notation cannot make them do so. This information can be used to, for example, determine appropriate notational durations, ties, etc.
Instead, do this.
- There is widespread belief that obfuscated, florid or unnecessarily complex notation may impress judges in composition competitions. Composers who enter competitions and who work under this assumption should then create two sets of scores: one for competition, another for performance.
