Went to Target last night and saw that they have H&R Block’s Tax Cut software on a flash drive for distribution. It cost slightly more than the CD version (about $5 more), but then it comes on a 256meg USB drive - which you could then use for other things.

It was only a matter of time, and it does intrigue me. I didn’t buy it (I’m a TurboTax guy myself), but I am curious as to how it works. Does it run the program from the USB drive? Does it automatically save your tax files to the USB drive? Could I start my taxes on my machine at home, then unplug the drive and plug it into my laptop and resume — without any real effort (that’s the key)?

USB drives are getting cheap enough that it could be a viable distribution mechanism for software. It’s intriguing from the usability standpoint. For example, if you could have your finance program (Money, Quicken, whatever) on it, with all of your files so that you could just plug it into any machine and update records. There are certainly privacy and security issues to worry about, but I like the concept.

It could even work for a point-of-sale system. Cool! Imagine… point of sale on a USB drive — just plug it into a PC with an internet connection and start ringing sales. Excellent…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Software Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.