Ted’s Rants and Raves by Ted M. Young

MarketWatch recently released a major upgrade to their portfolio tracking web application. Based on some reviews I’ve read elsewhere (including the one at TechCrunch), I decided that I should take a look. I currently use Google Finance’s portfolio for tracking my stocks because it made it easy to import my list of stocks by pasting in a CSV (comma-separated values) file into an input box. Unfortunately it has some glitches, such as not reporting the price of Nintendo correctly (though it uses the correct price for calculating the actual value of my shares), and no customization, and no charting.

Here’s Google’s quote for Nintendo:

Notice that the price (which should be the closing price of 76.10, since this was quoted well after the market closed) is the same as the opening price, 74.90, which is wrong. The fact that this is an ADR (American Depository Receipt) quoted on the “pink sheets” is no excuse:

And here’s Yahoo’s quote for Nintendo (taken within minutes of the Google snapshot)

Sure, Yahoo Finance could use a bit of a facelift in terms of layout, but at least they get the quotes right:

So, Yahoo gets the quotes right, but their portfolio system is really old — I don’t think it’s changed that much in the past 5 years (if not longer). Needless to say, it offers no importing of information, so I while I use it as my main quote source (delayed, of course, like all free quote sources), and for the news links (much more comprehensive than Google, if not overly so), it doesn’t serve my portfolio tracking needs. And, as I mentioned already, Google’s portfolio doesn’t have much in the way of features and is underwhelming in the news links area, which is especially surprising since they could just pull in the feeds from Google News.

Not Moving To MarketWatch’s Portfolio Tracker

When I first went to the new MarketWatch “My Portfolio”, it asked me if I wanted to import my old portfolio. I wasn’t quite sure what it meant, but I figured I’d say yes and see if it provided some way to import a portfolio from other web sites or at least from a file like Google Finance does. Alas, no: it was only for importing a portfolio that I might have already had on MarketWatch. Since I didn’t have one — though I wasn’t sure at first — it couldn’t import anything. I then looked around and couldn’t find any option for importing an existing portfolio. Since I wasn’t about to re-enter the information contained in my portfolio: number of shares, purchase price and date, commission, etc., I pretty much stopped there. Because there was no sample portfolio (which would have shown off its features), I entered a few stocks just to see how it looked (and I’ll have a closer look at the user interface soon), but there’s nothing I hate more than having to duplicate work that I’ve already done. And this could have been so easily avoided by providing a way to upload a spreadsheet (in either CSV, Excel, or OpenOffice format — or even all three!) or a pasted HTML table, i.e., one that I could have copied from another site. A fancy AJAX-based data-oriented web application doesn’t help if you haven’t thought about how a user is going to get their data into your application.

Oh well. Though it does open the door for a web-based service that could move your portfolio data around from site to site or even from, say, Quicken to Google Finance. Hmmm.

Since I originally started this blog for my rants (and raves) about software (creating and using), I didn’t feel up to posting anything since my father-in-law’s death in June from an unexpected stroke. However, I am going to start a separate blog to post (mostly rants) about the medical and health insurance industrial complex. Stay tuned for that.

In the meantime, I’m getting back on my horse and will also start some reflecting on introducing agile methods into a development environment, namely the company where I work: Guidewire Software.

And, lest you think I’m not ranting about anything in this post, I’d like to rant about Blogsome — yes, that’s the site that hosts this blog. Generally, Blogsome has been just fine, except that I hadn’t logged in for several months and so not only did I not remember my password, I couldn’t remember how to log in to my account so I could post. My expectation was that somewhere on the Blogsome home page there would be a place to type my username or at least take me to a login page, but there was none. So I looked for a help page or a FAQ, but there wasn’t one. I went to the forums, but didn’t feel like sifting through the threads to find the answer. Finally, I searched through my emails and found the original “welcome” email and used the link contained therein.

It shouldn’t be this hard. I can maybe understand the lack of help pages if you have a nice-sized forum, but the use cases for help pages vs. forums are quite different. What I can’t understand is hiding the login page. And it’s not just Blogsome that does this, but many other sites seem to have home pages that are geared towards new users, making the login/sign-in area hard to find. For example, Jellyfish (one of my favorite “rebate” sites, and I especially enjoy their Smack Shopping reverse auctions) makes it hard to find the login button and instead has a bunch of “wasted” space:

Yeah, it’s not only tiny, but it’s in brackets (further deemphasizing it) and is next to the “Sign Up Now” text, so you might even miss it — I have. And what happens when you click on the tiny login link?

Ohhh, that’s what the “wasted” space is for! Well why isn’t that just there the whole time? My guess: it would ruin the “design”. Form over function wins and the users lose. And lest you think that it’s just some random site that might not have the money for someone dedicated to usability, Washington Mutual Bank recently redesigned their site and now it suffers from the same problem:

Again, the web site is treating the customers it already has as second-class citizens by forcing us to spend extra mental effort trying to find the login area. The fact that it’s clearly labeled doesn’t help, since we’re programmed to look for a pair of input fields that signify a login area, a visual clue that’s missing here. So what happens when you hover over the little plus sign next to the Log in link?

There, that’s better. Just like Jellyfish, why couldn’t this be open all the time? There’s even less of an excuse here, not just because it’s a bank web site, but there’s no “design” to be ruined here, it’s all blank whitespace.

Remember, just because we can now do fancy things with Ajax, doesn’t mean we should sacrifice usability for “cool” designs.

So here’s something I can’t quite figure out. Google has thousands of smart software engineers, each of whom has 20% time (1 day a week to work on their own cool project), yet out of the three Google Apps (aka Google’s Microsoft Office Killer), only one (the spreadsheet) was created internally. The word processor is Writely (purchased from Upstartle in 2006) and the presentation program will be the just-purchased JavaPoint from Tonic Systems.

What does this say about Google’s ability to write web applications? Or other software? Let’s go down the list:

• Google Desktop: internally developed (as far as I know)
• Google Toolbar: internally developed
  
• GWT: purchased from a company in Atlanta in 2006
  
• Google Wiki: recently purchased from JotSpot (has yet to become a Google "product")
• Google Docs: aka Writely, purchased from Upstartle
• Google Spreadsheets: internally developed
• Google Presentation: there was "Presently", but that appears to be dead with the purchase of JavaPoint from Tonic Systems.
• GMail: internally developed
• Dodgeball: purchased and killed (or at least left to starve), and founders left Google
  
• Google Radio Ads: purchased from dMarc in 2005, but dMarc founders left Google
• Picasa: purchased in 2004
• Google Earth: purchased from Keyhole in 2004
  
• Google SketchUp: purchased in 2006
• Google Analytics: purchased from Urchin in 2005
• Google AdSense: purchased from Applied Semantics in 2003

I could probably go on, but you get the picture. It seems to me that Google is very good at purchasing technologies and (sometimes) applying the Google brand to make them popular (or at least more popular). However, Google is not so good about developing products internally and sometimes has trouble keeping the original teams as part of Google.