Re-purposing Kilgore’s famous soliloquy to Willard from Apocolypse Now, I love the smell of a vendor slugfest on an otherwise quiet Friday afternoon. And so it is. Earlier in the week on FinancialForce.com, Dave Turner seems to have set off a veritable firestorm from some of the SaaS players. Knowing Dave as well as I do (we go back 15 years) I can’t imagine for one minute he could have envisaged the blow back he’d get.
I commented on some of what I saw as inaccuracies in understanding ‘Private’ Ben Kepes original post on the topic. Dave then proceeded to provide a masterclass in why currency conversion isn’t the simple thing that many assume it to be and why customers might have difficulties with some approaches. Ben came back with the all too familiar jibe that accountants are nit pickers. In today’s currency world? Bugger off Ben – you’re blowing smoke up my ass. (And let’s not forget compensating errors.)
That quickly led to ‘Squadron Leader’ Ed Molyneux, CEO FreeAgent firing an exocet, defending the SME view on this topic and accusing Dave of being patronising. Ouch! Some dude called Eric jumped in to land Dave another punch about FinancialForce.com needing to be ‘multi-everything.’ Thwack! And if that wasn’t bad enough, ‘Colonel’ Rod Drury, CEO Xero proceeded to explain how outdated Dave’s thinking is. Blimey! Xero wasn’t even referenced in Dave’s piece. It’s like the French turning up to rout the English in the American War of Independence Blammo!
I’m not sure whether Dave comes out of this bloodied and bruised but I do know that such exchanges are great stuff for understanding the competing views of what constitutes the ever entertaining world of business software application development.
And you thought all was friendly in software development? Anyhoo – I do encourage you to read ALL the comments to Dave’s piece. They’re illuminating at many levels.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=ef1980f2-58da-4c46-b828-e924a8d7aeaf)
