Sometime around 2002 I was stewing in a jury selection room and I stumbled across an ad in PC World for “Oracle Small Business”.  From what I could tell it was a web based, on demand application that would automate CRM and accounting functions.  Before they were Oracle Small Business they called themselves NetLedger and were touting themselves as an online, on demand clone QuickBooks for something like $8.00/month.

This was right after the .com bubble burst.  I had no faith in Netleger but something with the Oracle name I could get behind.  It sounded like a perfect match and the price was reasonable.  However the software sucked huge ass at the time.  Nothing worked, ask anyone who has experience about OSB version 7.  What a POS, it took eight months of dedicated work to get it functional and that was after 10K worth of outside consulting.

Part of the problem was that Oracle Small business was going through an identy crisis.  The started as a QuickBooks clone focusing on the Small end of SMB.  Morphed into Oracle Small business to address the meat of the SMB market.  Changed back to NetLedger and then went to NetSuite and started to look at the enterprise space and forget the SMB.  They did all of this in the course of about three years.

In any case we had the software working well enough and it started to stabilize around version 9.  D-Tools was growing and we signed a new three year deal for 20+ licenses.  There were still tons of technical problems but in general if you did not push it too hard it worked OK.  During that time it became apparent that they were going after the enterprise market and did not care about the small end of SMB.  Also they started parsing out bits and pieces of their “One System, No Limits” Into many systems with lots of limits.  We started out when there was one system that did it all, use what you need to a crazy menu of choices and confusing options.  Also the price went through the roof once you added all the “options” that were part of the original system.

Eventually the NetSuite business style and price model forced us to look elsewhere for a CRM/Accounting solution.  I will go more detail on why we left NS in a separate post.  Here is the new post

Adam

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