I’m sure they will achieve the 80% or so annual growth over the next 5 years they will need to justify the 90c share offer – I’m in!
(assumes flat burn ~$7M yr, starting revenues of $1M, 5 year window before MYOB/Intuit respond properly and a 20% discount rate)

Meanwhile there are issues with DRM/security – she was locked out of MYOB on her own computer and had to wait until working hours to call MYOB – that $50 doesn’t get 24/7 service.

At the end of the day it’s like the Mac versus PC thing – at one point I just said “no more” and refused to support my parent’s computing unless they moved to Apple. They eventually did (it didn’t take long) and now there is no support required.

While my mother knows how to suffer with MYOB that is no reason not to switch to another product where she won’t suffer, and may even enjoy the monthly accounting process.

Why?

Like, seriously. She has all her “stuff” already in MYOB, she already knows how to use MYOB, and she doesn’t pay $50/month ($1800 over three years for those keeping count) to use it.

As for “NewXCo”, would I really want to do market research for Xero? After all, if the product were successful, what incentive would Xero have for not rolling their own – particularly since I can imagine a /huge/ amount of NIH being present round their boardroom table. (yeah, I’ve done this before – http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/soundtrackpro/process.html)

Just thought I’d explain the key conversions available to businesses and accountants today.

We offer a specialised conversion service for our accounting partners to convert the Chart of Accounts and Historical balances for previous years from an MYOB Accountants Office file to Xero http://blog.xero.com/2009/01/myobao_export/

For businesses, we have a standard chart of accounts import
(http://help.xero.com/nz/#Settings_ChartofAccountsCSV, a contacts import http://help.xero.com/#Contacts_Import and invoice import http://help.xero.com/#Accounts_InvoiceImport

A list of all imports and exports are available in our excellent Help Centre here: http://help.xero.com/#ImportExport

Switching at the end of a GST period is straight forward if your books are up to date so there is no need to wait until a new financial year. We’d recommend you talk to one of our certified accounting partners http://www.xero.com/advisors/ who know this process well.

We’re continually looking for ways to make switching to Xero even easier and plan to offer further improvements to our conversion tools in the coming months. Stay tuned.

Regards,

Stuart Bale
General Manager – Accounting Partners
Xero Limited

Flick me an e and we can discuss some more…