Posts by Will Neale

Cutting us off at 4 weeks notice?

I am absolutely lost for words. Mamut have just confirmed that our existing payroll service will DIE at 4 weeks notice. Wow.

We now have 4 weeks to scramble around, find a new payroll supplier and migrate all our payroll accounting functions to them - in the run up to Christmas. What on earth is Microsoft thinking - at the very least surely they'd leave it running until PAYE year end (March) so that we can process P35s etc.? What an incredible way to alienate the important small business sector.

We can't afford to take risks with tied-in Microsoft software any longer. I'm heading for the cloud - we've already ditched Exchange + Outlook in favour of Google Mail with our own domain.

Sage feels pretty antiquated - anyone know which are the best cloud accounting software suppliers for small business (ie. not Netsuite as it's many £000s / year). What about xero.com (though it has no UK payroll integration)?

3G is 100% relevant!

Olaf says "...3G is irrelevent with much faster WIFI on board. The world is going to WIFI and most people have WIFI ar home/office where they spend most of their time..."

3G is NOT made irrelevant by wifi. The only reason for owning a mobile is so that you can do stuff whilst out and about. When you are at home you might well have a wi-fi connection - in which case you also have a PC and you'll just use that.

Mobile has always been a compromise of functionality and cost in favour of convenience and 'anywhere, anytime, anyplace' access. It will always remain the same. 3G is 100% relevant - it works pretty much everywhere, wifi works pretty much nowhere and subscribing to a wi-fi service plan or buying hotspot minutes is just as expensive as an unlimited 3G data-plan, which works anywhere.

Go and buy a SIM free handset

I don't agree with operators 'hobbling' wi-fi on handsets, BUT you do have a choice:

1) Go and buy a SIM free Nokia N95 for £600 that is not locked down to networks/services and does not contain operator firmware; do what you want with it and spend your money on the networks that you choose (wi-fi, GSM or otherwise).

2) Accept Vodafone's offer to pay most of the cost of the handset on your behalf (the generous subsidy), and accept that they therefore have to try and make money from you by driving data across their network using their software and services.

You can't have it both ways - you can't expect Vodafone to subsidise your handset if you are then going to spend all your money with wi-fi/VoIP providers. Your choice.

Fair enough?