Finance-Software

This book is so easy to understand, you don't need a surgeon's brain to comprehend, it's as easy as they come, I mean 1-2-3 easy, you have to read this book, it changed my life for the better! It can change yours too.

I never used Turbotax before this year, but between this book and the software itself I was able to do my taxes in one day. I was guided effortlessly through child care expenses, ROTH conversions, capital gains and of course itemized deductions. What a life-saver!!

I have reviewed many of the formulas in several sections of this book and have found a number of mistakes. As a result, I can trust no formula from the book without reviewing the literature or some other source.

The author does not use consistent terminology throughout the book. Rather, the terminology of the original journal article is used for each pricing model. This makes referring to the articles convenient, but then you don't need the book if you're going to the source...

I have used few of the computer programs offered, but the ones that I have used have had terrible inefficiencies. For example, a bisectional iterative search was used, which is very simple to write but is also very inefficient. There are many other simple and more efficient alternatives.

This book is extremly usefull and I would recommend it to everyone involded in quickly implementing new and complex derivatives securities. Some pricing formulas such as the three dimensional binomial trees are very refreshing tools to price all kinds of two asset options. The disk provided is simple of use, the financial notation is rigourous, the code is very accessible, and remarkably empty or programming errors ! It is very easy to customize the source code to price and analyse on a spreadsheet, all sorts of proprietary derivative securities.

Have you ever wished someone took all the significant option formulas of the last 25 years and packed them into one volume? Is your calculus rusty? How about putting the formulas into Visual Basic so they can be employed directly in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or Access databases. This is the main appeal of Option Pricing Formulas, which fills a void in current option literature. As option players became more computer literate an anthology of coded option theory was clearly needed.

The book covers everything from the tried and true Black Scholes and Cox/ Rubenstein formulas to the more exotic worlds of barrier and currency translated options. Software is included with the Visual Basic code as well as preprogrammed Excel files. Think of it as a cookbook for the technically oriented option trader.

QuickBooks 99 is a royal pain to use, so I bought this book to learn how to use it. The author does a good job of explaining how to use the software (and I really like the way QuickBooks commands are colored in orange), but unfortunately she forgets that the reader is a "complete dummy" who also needs a crash course on accounting. There is some basic information, but not enough to help you understand why you are using a particular function of QB to do something.

Still, I recommend this book over "QuickBooks 99 for Dummies."

With all the various information available concerning the Microsoft monopoly, it was wonderful to find an objective source that followed the events before and during the Microsoft case, analyzed the monopolistic tendencies of the software market in general, and compared this information with previous monopolies. The best characteristic of this book is that it explains the events and legalities of the case in such a way that it is not at all difficult to understand.

The contributions to this work are all excellent, well written articles by the most respected experts on the leading edge of antitrust analysis.

The lesson this reader learned from Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscape and Its Battle With Microsoft is that you cannot publish a book on this topic in current time. Today we know that Netscape was dominated by Microsoft on three fronts. Microsoft attacked the Java technology that was Netscape's future, they eliminated Netscape's revenue stream by paying for Navigator browser removal and IE free distribution, and they forced Netscape to support past spaghetti code to match Microsoft's browser release schedules. Netscape existed for only four years. It, like many software startups, quickly built up a brand name and was sold. End of story.

But David B. Yoffie and Michael A. Cusumano would like us to believe that Netscape is (or could have been) an on going competitive concern. The first question asked by the authors is "Why will Netscape be around when we finish this book about a year and a half from now?"

Rather than pursue that question in any depth, the authors quote a Netscape official and then present principles they believe should apply when a company operates on Internet time. Some of those principles, for professional software developers and managers, border on malpractice.

Chapter Five, Development Strategy, is particularly troublesome. Responsible presentations on this topic relate rapid application design and object oriented tools to classical approaches and will present a life cycle that includes design, development, testing, and maintenance. The authors ignore function point analysis; lines of code are presented as if they were representative of effort. In a presentation sure to anger any CFO, a model for project management that ignores budgets and cost is presented.

I purchased this book because of its potential for explaining the Microsoft antitrust case. Certainly it has value for that purpose. It presents, for example, relevant material regarding the importance of Java to Netscape's development efforts, the use of fewer testers owing to possibly more mature coding staff, and the inability to get Netscape customers and investors to wait for a browser based on Java. The latter forced Netscape into maintaining and releasing a code base it had planned on abandoning. But the reader has to draw many conclusions. The authors note that "It is perfectly legal to win a near-monopoly through good business practices. But, once you have a dominant position, special rules apply." Does that mean that Netscape should still exist, or does it mean that the principles presented in the book have little practical value?

Certainly the work could have been better. It could have predicted the eventual sale of Netscape, instead of, in the last chapters, presenting a prescription for improvement. There will be other books on Netscape vs. Microsoft, by individuals closer to the action. It will be interesting to compare this work with accounts from the practitioners.

Probably fine as a business tome, but as an entertaining read, I found this a failure. I hardly got through the first few pages; the books starts with a long, obvious and patronising exposition about how internet has transformed our lives and what a revolution it's been. It reminded me a lot of "The Road Ahead" by Bill Gates.
Microsoft has been commercially successful, but at the cost of integrity. It has none whatsoever. This may indeed be Microsoft's downfall in the end, because the hatred towards this company is reaching a fever pitch. More and more users will realise that they can get by using other operating systems and products, supported by companies who have a less selfish vision for the future of computing.

One thing that I especially enjoyed about this book is that it almost completely avoided any gratuitous Gates/Microsoft bashing that appears to be vogue these days. Instead, Cusumano and Yoffie take the reader on a detailed yet interesting dissection of the organizations and decision making processes of the top brass at both Microsoft and Netscape. I also liked the way the authors would candidly point out where bad decisions/strategies were made, but fairly analyzed why they failed, and why they might have seemed like good decisions at the time. The allusions and comparisons to judo strategy in business were interesting as well.