Backlash causes Microsoft to pay out to help stranded MS Accounting customers KashFlow Accounting Software

If you’re a watcher of the accounting software market, you can’t have missed the fact that Microsoft withdrew their accounting product recently. The very short notice on the withdrawal of the software, along with the payroll element being turned off left lots of customers stranded. The customer base was sold to Mamut who don’t have a great track record of looking after bought-in customer bases.

Richard Tyler at The Telegraph has picked up some interesting info from Microsofts PR firm.

Firstly the numbers:

There were 650 companies using the payroll element of the software. This was quite a neat implementation of their Software + Services strategy that I was dismissive of back in February. So the accounting software is locally installed but the Payroll calculations were done externally out in the cloud.

There were 90,000 users of the free version of the accounting software and 10,000 paying customers.

There were some seriously peed off MS customers talking to the media about how the short notice left them high and dry when it comes to paying staff over the christmas period.

Microsoft have stepped in and said it will now pay the 650 customers to use Mamuts payroll software. Good save!

Side Note: Mamut don’t seem to understand SaaS. A press release with the title “Mamut reveals SaaS service for Irish SMEs” caught my eye recently. Further inspection reveals it’s not SaaS at all. They’re just using the services of RentSoft who have technology to allow you to rent software you’d usually buy outright. RentSoft had a relationship with MYOB so I guess that’s how this came about.

Tags: Mamut, Microsoft, Payroll, Richard Tyler, telegraph

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 4:32 pm and is filed under Accounting, Small Business, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Julian Shaw says:

December 1, 2009 at 4:41 pm

I read David James’ in the paper over the weekend. He was saying that when it looks like a good save, it’s usually because the keeper has cocked up positioning in the first place.

David Toohey says:

December 1, 2009 at 4:52 pm

It is a shame these large companies with vast resources can’t plan such decisions with some level of consultation with their customers, if not at least some consideration of them.

Surely they must realise a large number of the users they would attract are not professional service providers but general consumers and small business that put their faith in products provided by businesses with such a strong image as Microsoft.

To then pull the plug on a software service such as payroll with such little notice really shows how they can be out of touch with their users’ needs.