"Many of us would be willing to pay a bit more to keep QQL running. " "A bit" might not have been enough. There's no way to know for sure since they don't report segreated P&L, but even doubling their fees might not have been enough for them. Pure speculation, but here's a possible scenario - let's suppose you're the CEO and you let one of your folks go down this QQL route a while ago. Now you find after all this that you maybe still haven't even turned net profitable and you still need the initial investment repaid if/when it does finally eek into the green. Suppose the numbers say that you've got to either triple your customer base or more than double the cost to become profitable. You're not likely to triple your base for years and by more than doubling your costs you believe you'll be disadvantaged to more functional competitors. Your profit magin is 50%+ on your software products and you could reallocate funds and resources to new product development. What would you do? People equate what they perceived to probably be a large customer base and a low cost product with profitability. If you sell dollar bills for 80 cents each, you'll get a lot of customers and people will absolutely love your service. They might even be willing to pay "a bit" more for your product. But when are you ever going to become profitable? Except for perhaps if a non-profit company was created to deliver a high quality datafeed at cost, everyone's in the business of making as much money as possible. Intuit's shareholders aren't going to care if they're delivering a high quality product at a cheap price to the raves of the users if the company's not making any/enough money doing it. Someone had a good idea - but my guess is they couldn't figure out how to deliver it and still make enough profit. Also seemed like they didn't know where to take/enhance the product. And since they didn't sell it, it's probably a good chance they weren't making any material profit. It's not management's fault if in fact they killed it because the experiment failed and it simply wasn't profitable enough. Isn't that what they're supposed to do?
ArchAngel.. Simply killing the software is a poor solution IMHO.. with so many loyal customers showing support, and in a business as competitive as this one, it is hard for me to believe that simply terminating service is the best solution.. there was obviously a more creative solution possible. QQL had a big fee margin to use up, their service was just as competitive as esignals and qcharts, at nearly half the price. I'd rather pay QQL $89/month than cough it up to esignal.. So I have to disagree with you, and unless you can show me the cost structure, a balance sheet and meeting notes from Intuit supporting your reasoning, your points are a bit more pointless than most..
Quicken could make QQL support datafeed from various sources, like Esignal. I will be interested to buy the software.
Riesgo - Back at ya - presumably you've based your conclusion on hard data?? Thought not. Your personal perception of loads of loyal customers and your personal opinion that there was "obviously a more creative solution" is way short of the criteria you wanted to apply to the alternate hypothesis. So it's unclear who's points are pointless. You're assuming that QQL would be sufficiently profitable (based on whatever Intuit considered sufficient) if they'd say doubled their fees. Why is that assumption any more valid than assuming that it wouldn't be? Only way to know for sure is to know exactly how many customers they had, what their operating costs were, what Intuit's required return was, and how much they'd sunk into the thing already. If anyone digs that info up it will be very instructive. Without that, it's a guessing game on either side of the argument and either hypothesis is plausible. Although assuming that they were (or could easily and quickly) become sufficiently profitable and management killed it anyway seems less likely than the scenario that they simply weren't (and weren't likely to easily become) sufficiently profitable and Intuit decided to cut its losses (and couldn't sell it because it was unprofitable). If they weren't making enough money and weren't likely too soon, then the "obvious" solution was to kill it. And even if corporate decided it wasn't a business they didn't want to be in or it didn't deliver as much return as they required from their operations, if QQL was profitable they would have tried to sell it. If it wasn't profitable, they probably couldn't have sold it and maybe didn't want to bleed more money while they vanely searched. I'm not saying definitively that Intuit management didn't actually kill it in spite of it making boat loads of money - I'm just saying that the alternate perspective (i.e., it wasn't making any/enough money) seems more likely. It's maybe not as comforting as believing that some evil doers at Intuit corporate stupidly killed a great and profitable service and that there "just had to be" better options. Maybe it's true, but it's hardly the simplest (and thus the more likely) conclusion. It might not even be corporate management's fault that it had to be killed. For all any of us knows, the folks directly responsible for the QQL operation might have been inadequate for the job and even though customers seemed happy with it, they couldn't figure out how to make enough money doing it. In that case, corporate management was just doing their job by capping off a leaking pipe. And while it would have been an option three years ago, the market climate today wouldn't exactly let them launch a spinoff IPO of an unprofitable business unit as an alternative to shutting it down. BTW, I might have missed it, but in looking through their 10-K and various 10-Qs, I couldn't even find an off-hand reference to QQL, let alone anything that highlighted results (although they do mention their various other products and services). Seems like if they're not even mentioning it, then they don't want to draw shareholder attention to it. And they'd probably only do that if it was losing money.
I don't get it, either. It would seem the datafeed and the way it's displayed are separate issues. QQL worked great; why can't they arrange for the software to be used with someone else's datafeed? I've spent about 30 hours during non-market time this past week just to arrange eSignal into layouts I like, and I've concluded they just "don't get" intraday trading. It's way too cumbersome to move among time frames, and what's with these single-pixel-wide volume bars?! The Time-and-Sales window has all this unremovable extra crap in it ... You just can't make fast visual judgments using their software.
They have a hideable favorites bar to quickly adjust time frames, it takes one click. The volume bar thinckness is adjustable. The tape does need filters.
Riesgo, thanks for response. But I can't find these. Are you using the "Advanced Charting" package or the Standard? Where are you finding these?
The favorites tool bar and adjustable volume bar thickness is part of advanced charting, if you start a new advanced chart, the favorite tool bar appears along the top of the chart window.
I could see eSignal charging more for additional functions in its "Advanced Charting" -- but its criminal to force the user to buy the more expensive version just so you can see the volume bars or just so you can maneuver among the limited variety of charts offered in the standard version. I've tried Medved's QuoteTracker today. I can't judge the feed since this is Sunday, but it seems to offer more flexibility in its FREE charting than is offered by eSignal's STANDARD charting. For instance, there IS a way to change the thickness of the bars, and Time & Sales may be more to my liking. It's also easier to navigate. It has serious limitations, like you can't get prior days' intraday data. But it's amazing that the interface is better than eSignal's, considering it's free. I'm sufficiently pissed off with eSignal's lack of usability in its Standard offering that I plan on looking at all my alternatives before considering caving in to their high-priced spread.
I hear you, I felt the same way, I refused to give in to Esignal, but in the end it came to a choice between QCharts and Esignal, all the others had something unacceptable. I am paying more for esignal than QQL, but I am also paying less than QCharts, and esignal included options and futures. I doubt you can find a better deal. if so keep us posted.