QuickBooks starts so fast that it’s visible in the menu bar before my eyes can get up there. That means that I don’t see the menu bar change, which makes me think that it hasn’t actually finished launching yet. This shows how much I’ve become used to the slowness of web apps.

They tried to do the standard “tech” thing, which is to dumb it down to the lowest common denominator. It failed due to backlash, but only because there’s a huge user base with decades of time using it. New tools don’t have the benefit of that backlash. I’m looking at you, Slack!

Getting started in QuickBooks is annoying and slow. Likewise Vim, Emacs, any Unix shell, or OmniFocus. But if you need these tools then you’ll probably use them for decades. You do a disservice by valuing a 4-hour learning curve in a tool that you’ll spend 20,000 hours in.