Sunday, March 21, 2004

Worst buying decision this year: TaxCut Deluxe 2003 and the nature of market failures

What a waste. I should have spent the time and money on my accountant. TurboTax reviews on Amazon are hardly better. Looks like the tax law, and rampant product piracy, has finally broken the end-user software market.

Next year I won't even bother.

I really miss the software quality I experienced in the 1980s and early 1990s. Nowadays the only quality software seems to come from small businesses (often shareware) and a few major open source projects. Neither are likely to provide home accounting or tax software. Guess it's back to spreadsheets.

Talk about market failures ...

BTW. As usual Amazon reviews are a much more reliable source of information than trade industry magazines.

[Addendum: it turns out some of the most glaring defects were actually fixed, but Tax Cut doesn't remind users to exit and restart after an update is downloaded. This doesn't change my net opinion though.

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