Intuit "Reboots" TurboTax

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Apr 18
2006

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I can't imagine a more potent "news from the future" story that underlines how the web is becoming the new software platform than today's New York Times report that Intuit compared the temporary shutdown of TurboTax yesterday to a software reboot:

Some TurboTax users encountered a brief filing delay Monday afternoon when the software maker Intuit Inc. shut down its computer system to prepare for the heavier volume of electronic tax filing expected later in the evening.
Intuit spokeswoman Julie Miller equated the move to the rebooting of a PC and said the company decided to do the ''preventative maintenance'' before the system could potentially slow to a crawl for the inevitable thousands of last-minute tax filers.

Steve Bellovin, who posted this news to Dave Farber's IP list, wrote: "To me, that smells of buggy code, and probably a resource leak. Of course, I don't know if it's Intuit's software or the underlying OS." I'm not sure it matters which -- what the news does suggest, though, that as Web 2.0 matures, it will be subject to many of the same aches and pains as other software systems. What's more, it suggests just how important operational competency is going to be in the Web 2.0 era. When a Web application crashes, it crashes for everyone. As they become mission-critical, Web 2.0 applications need a much higher level of fail-safe.

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Comments: 11

mason [04.18.06 01:17 PM]

shutting down a collection of (presumably load balanced and redundant) webapp servers supported by a collection of (presumably load balanced and redundant) databases to do an upgrade or fix a leak sounds more like buggy planning or a buggy operations team than buggy software / os.

Dharmesh Shah [04.18.06 02:28 PM]

I think this whole SaaS (Software as a Service) trend is going to put increasing pressure on software companies to be good at both product development *and* operations.

Spolod [04.19.06 02:16 AM]

"as Web 2.0 matures, it will be subject to many of the same aches and pains as other software systems. What's more, it suggests just how important operational competency is going to be in the Web 2.0 era."

Oh please, not more Web 2.0 nonsense. Why wouldn't this non-existent paradigm be subject to the same constraints as 'Web 1.0'? Does it run on special Web 2.0 hardware?

Oren Sreebny [04.19.06 04:37 AM]

I think there's a real tension between the develop-quickly-release-often style that increasingly characterizes the more innovative and responsive web offerings and the kind of careful and deliberate (if slow) planning for large-scale production services that have been common in big data center operations for years (think of airline reservation or banking apps for example).

We're going to have to think of ways to cope with these kinds of scaling and performance issues without sacrificing flexibility and responsiveness.

Tim O'Reilly [04.19.06 09:45 AM]

Spolod -- the big difference is that in "Web 2.0", the web is much more focused on applications. If a web news site went down for a couple of hours, it wasn't a big deal. If TurboTax online filing goes down on tax day, it's the end of the world for a lot of people. While Web 2.0 might seem like nonsense to you, and I certainly concede that any other name might do as well, there is a kind of continental divide (after which the watershed flows in another direction) in any computing movement. For example, a DOS-based PC and a Windows PC were both PCs, but the ascendancy of the GUI interface as a standard clearly marked a new era in computing. Companies (like Lotus) that made a wrong bet suffered. Web 2.0 is the same. It is indeed the same web that Tim B-L introduced in 1991 (Web 0.5), but growing into its potential, after a side-trip in the dot.com boom and bust of "Web 1.0".

Thomas Lord [04.19.06 11:08 AM]

It seems fundamentally irresponsible, to me, to make a massively popular tax filing tool a centralized web app. To do so creates a massive vulnerability with high-stakes valuation and incites lots of people to rely on it. What are they thinking?!?

-t

AH [04.20.06 09:33 AM]

Rhetorical question: Do you really WANT your taxes based on some "Web 2.0" service?

Tim O'Reilly [04.20.06 09:41 AM]

AH -- absolutely. See the first bullet on my entry at http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/04/second_order_consequences_of_w.html

Jeff Carroll [04.20.06 02:58 PM]

I habitually use the boxed version of TurboTax, but even that seemed to be coming apart at the seams this year. It handled my federal return OK, but despite reassurances from Intuit online support didn't even attempt to do the right thing on my Alabama state return. At the last moment I had to download the PDF forms from Montgomery, throw up my hands, and for the first time in my life file for an extension.

I was delighted by Alabama's downloadable self-calculating PDF forms, though. Open them in Adobe Reader and fill in the numbers, and the form does its own math and calculates your tax bill. Hit the "Print" button, and you're done.

Luciak [01.09.07 03:18 PM]

Well, if they are making a product that is intendet to be used by that many people, they should think in advence about they ability to make the service worth using.

Luciak [01.09.07 03:21 PM]

I forgot - another thing is that someone may not predict that much of interest about their product but not that kind of a company which Intuit is. Their TurboTax is not a new product on the market. And people who use TurboTax to fill 1040ez form is a numerous comunity :P They should know that.

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