Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Intuit (Quicken): We don't just hate our customers. We make them scream.

Amazon.com: Electronics: Quicken 2005 Deluxe [Plan, Save, Take Control] [CD]

Wow. I've never seen a product sold on Amazon that got an average rating of 1.5 stars. This is a new record.

I first used Quicken in the 1980s. I think I started with version 2.0 on DOS 3.1. That was a great application, though it did tend to corrupt its database. Nobody's perfect. I started using a Quicken credit card around then -- got my transactions on a diskette. Completely reliable. Sigh. The credit card transactions were never reliable after Quicken moved to electronic downloads instead of the USPS.

Intuit has been a pretty steady death spiral for about 10 years. With Quicken 2005 they're scraping the bottom. I'm on QKN 2002, but Intuit has kindly informed me that as of 4/19 I won't be able to do funds transfer any more (never mind the revenue they make on my Quicken credit card). Quicken 2005 won't work with the relatively open OFX transaction standard, Quicken has stopped supporting that standard since they want to move transactions through their proprietary systems and capture the significant licensing revenue. Businesses, banks, and credit cards are balking -- they want to stay with OFX.

I hope the banks stand their ground.

It's time for me to move to Microsoft Money -- or, better yet, give up and go to a paper ledger. I'm lazy though, so first I'll see if I can find a copy of QKN 2003 or 2004. That ought to give me another year to switch to Microsoft Money.

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