What's with the account list masking off all but the last four digits of
account numbers with X's? I mean, seriously, this is just beyond whacko.
It's better Security Theater than the TSA show at your neighborhood airport.
The account number is one r-click "See account settings" away. Whatever
could be the point of hiding it on this screen? Who are we hiding it from?
The application is trying to encourage shipping financial data all over the
web at all times of the day and night in the name of "Essential" function
and "most users prefer" and here on the Account List it tries to hide my
account numbers from, ahem, me? Microsoft has added the whole yodlee loop to
handling people's financial data and here they want to get cutesy about
hiding account numbers? What a joke. Who derived the requirements for this
upgrade? Daffy Duck?
Anybody else notice Charles and Amy using the PowerBook in the screen for
setting up Tools|Settings|Sharing? Does this mean that Money for the Mac is
coming? (Of course, why this settings screen among all of the others in the
random walk we now call Tools|Options needs a pretty little picture is
another interesting question.)
BTW, for those of you who are curious what the Fact Sheet meant when it said
"New Multiuser access. Now the primary Money user can allow another person
to view, monitor and manage the same Microsoft Money file from different
locations without sharing passwords.", I can answer that question. Hint: it
doesn't mean what it says. What it really means, apparently, is that
multiple Passport users can get associated with your Sync With the Web
account.
I think Microsoft is INTENTIONALLY trying to mask or downplay the
interaction of this version with the web. I think they are betting that high
negative reactions to the question "I want my financial data scattered all
over the web" can be overcome by soft-pedaling what lots of these features
actually do and I think they are betting that the same users who are
paranoid about security and privacy will be too ill-informed and too lazy to
really figure out what they this thing really does under the covers. I'm
sure Microsoft would say that all of this is explained one place or another
in the application, and they probably are correct. But any long time
newsgroup reader knows that even things like the file upgrade dialogs about
revertability and the .Mnn file and so forth are at best not understood and,
more typically, not even noticed or remembered.
BTW, I'm still searching for "Enhanced Spending Analysis. This powerful
feature automatically generates a pie chart of expense categories over
various time frames, and shows dollar amounts and percentage breakouts for
each area. With the new Spending Average, people can view a monthly dollar
average for spending per category based on past account data." I found a pie
chart in reports.Maybe this is the one they were talking about? Where these
averages are remains a mystery. I tried searching in help for "spending
analysis", "spending average," "analysis," "analyze," and "spending." Sad to
say, I came up empty.