Intuit Disables Features in Quicken To Force Upgrades

Numerous people submitted a blurb from BoingBoing about Intuit disabling features in older versions of Quicken. Why the BoingBoing submitter and Mr. Doctorow are so upset about this I don't know; when you buy software that's dependent on a for-profit company to keep working, what do you expect?

Why not GnuCash?

[michelcultivo (524114)]

Why not use GnuCAsh [gnucash.org]? It's so difficult to integrate with online banking?

Re:Why not GnuCash?

[blowdart (31458)]

Because it doesn't run on the same OS as Quicken? Because it supports a standard that banks are only starting to open up to?

If software doesn't run on your OS and doesn't talk to your bank then the fact that it's open doesn't help much.

(And no, it doesn't talks to my bank)

Re:Why not GnuCash?

[Geek of Tech (678002)]

What you put:
Because it doesn't run on the same OS as Quicken? Because it supports a standard that banks are only starting to open up to?

The actual reason:
Because it runs on an OS not dependent on any one source? Because it supports a standard?

I figured those two were obvious. Anything that supports a standard must be evil and communistic! I'm pretty sure netcraft confirmed that...

Re:Why not GnuCash?

[Alioth (221270)]

On a point of pedantry, GnuCash runs on pretty much any UNIX platform (*BSD, Solaris) as well as Linux.

Parent Assumption Wrong, Article Correct (gasp)

[Somegeek (624100)]

Please mod parent -1 Self Important, Would Rather Post Than Read.

Here is a the link, (from the article quoted in the Michael's story), to the Intuit statement:

http://www.intuit.com/support/quicken/sunset/ [intuit.com]

where Intuit states (amidst the spin doctoring):

"As of April 19th, 2005, in accordance with the Quicken sunset policy, Online Services1 and Live Technical Support2 will no longer be available for Quicken 2001 and 2002 users. These services include online bill pay; downloading financial data from your bank, credit union, credit card, brokerage, 401(k) or mutual fund accounts; downloading stock quotes, news headlines and other financial information into Quicken; uploading portfolio information from Quicken to Quicken.com; and access to the investing features on Quicken.com including portfolio tracking, any watch lists you have created, One-Click Scorecard(TM), Stock Evaluator and Mutual Fund Evaluator. To continue using these services and maintain access to live technical support from an Intuit representative, you will need to upgrade."

Re:Parent Assumption Wrong, Article Correct (gasp)

[Thing 1 (178996)]

I am a Quicken 2000 user. My online services were turned off a year ago.

I will give them not one more cent of my hard-earned money. I started with Quicken back before they used years as version numbers, and bought 5 or 6 upgrades. 2000 was "good enough" although they didn't easily handle put/call options.

But after last year, FUCK THEM! And they didn't even learn from it, I mean, it's not like my packets between me and my bank have to go through Intuit's servers and thus they have costs that they want to keep down by turning off my ability to communicate with my bank.

This is a money grab, pure and simple, one that I had to deal with last year and never will again.

Re:Why not GnuCash?

[Rich0 (548339)]

I've tried this and kmymoney. They are getting there, but they're not close enough for me.

The last time I tried (probably six months ago), the budgeting features were not good, online downloading and uploading of transactions looked to be incompatible with my bank, and reporting was not as versitile. The transaction registers themselves worked just fine, though.

It is also difficult to just experiement with the online features since it is your bank, and if it is working with quicken already do you want to mess with possibly getting the online service in some strange state? Financial software really only works well if all your transactions are in one place, so nobody would want to cut-over unless they had a fairly high degree of confidence that the FOSS alternatives are ready for prime-time.

I ended up buying quicken 2K4 for about $5-10 mail-order. If you buy a one-year-old version it isn't nearly as much of a ripoff.

Re:Why not GnuCash?

[scarolan (644274)]

Cause GnuCash is hard to use, that's why! Yes, you and I understand that the double-entry accounting system is the proper way to do things but try explaining that to my wife who is in charge of paying the bills each month, with online billpay through Quicken no less. The problem Intuit has run into is that their software reached its full-featured peak around 1999 or 2000, after that there really wasn't anywhere for them to go. What do you do when your software has all the features the end-user needs, and works well enough for most people? With open source software, once a project has reached maturity, it can be left alone and become a useful tool for years and years afterwards. Take for example something like vi/vim - it does everything a text editor should do. But the developers who work on it do not have anxious shareholders knocking at the door wanting to see never-ending growth and profits. Hence Intuit has to force the customers to upgrade to squeeze out more profits.

And what alternative do you have?

[blowdart (31458)]

when you buy software that's dependent on a for-profit company to keep working, what do you expect?

Considering there are no (that I know of) open source or not for profit alternatives that allow you to pay your bills online like Quicken does what alternative do users have?

Re:And what alternative do you have?

[bwalling (195998)]

Considering there are no (that I know of) open source or not for profit alternatives that allow you to pay your bills online like Quicken does what alternative do users have?

Well, there's Microsoft Money!

Re:And what alternative do you have?

[Geek of Tech (678002)]

Nah, if it ain't got Clippy, it ain't worth nuttin'.

Re:And what alternative do you have?

[rah1420 (234198)]

The problem is that the tail's wagging the dog. Why on Earth are people using their check register to pay their bills?

I log onto my web site [knbt.com] with Firefox and use my bank's online bill pay feature to pay my bills. I can download these transactions into whatever money manager supports their download format. I don't bother, preferring to scrape the screen and put the display into a text editor, as I can then import it into my spreadsheet with a few clicks.

Cost: About $6 a month. Beholden to: Only my bank, and I trust them to be the custodian of my money anyway, so I'd better trust them.

Intuit has been sending me begging and pleading letters to upgrade my Quicken 4.0 for years, and all I do is laugh and throw them in the recycling bin.

Do I want Intuit telling my bank what to do? Hell no! That's why I do this rather than initiate bill pays from the payee's web site; you gotta push, don't pull the transaction.

Hint: If you use the bank's software to communicate with the bank, you'll never have a problem.

Re:And what alternative do you have?

[Lumpy (12016)]

why??

because I prefer not to give the place I have my car loan $6.00 every month for "online processing fee". My mortgage their $7.00 online processing fee, and the electric company their $4.95 processing fee.

it is FAR cheaper for these companies to accept online payments. The time it takes staff to open a letter, find my account, and enter the information as well as traffic the check is far longer and much more expensive for them to process a debit electronically.

Until all online payments are 100% fre

Re:And what alternative do you have?

[Gryphon (28880)]

There's no guarantee of security no matter how you do your banking. A major bank in Canada (CIBC) lost a lot of credibility when it was discovered they'd (mistakenly) been sending customer records, unshredded, to a junk yard somewhere in the United States.

The sad part is the junk yard owner was calling the bank for two years to report this to them, and they didn't listen.

When the guy finally called the media, CIBC sued the junk yard owner!

Re:Bank Web sites & paying online

[Rich0 (548339)]

I do and it is free. However, it is much nicer to just enter a transaction and have it uploaded to the bank, than to enter a transaction in your software, and then enter it again online.

Part of the problem is that as for-profit enterprises Quicken and MS Money can spend a lot more on bank marketing. They can get their foot in the door with their proprietary standards much more quickly. Neither is going to want to make it easy for a FOSS package to play-ball...

Re:Alternatives

[tomhudson (43916)]

You also have the alternative to call them (Intuit) on this new policy and demand a refund of the price you paid for your product. This is a new policy that they re trying to apply retroactively, which you did not agree to when you bought the product:

As of April 19th, 2005, in accordance with the Quicken sunset policy, Online Services1 and Live Technical Support2 will no longer be available for Quicken

2001 and 2002 users.

If this wasn't a new policy, they wouldn't have to be doing it for 2 years worth of products (since 2001 would have been EOL'ed last year).

This is consumer fraud at its worst. My guess is Intuit is in a cash squeeze and needs to raise some $$$ fast.

We're going to see the same thing in a few years when Microsoft starts refusing to issue activation keys when you reinstall XP because it too will be EOL'ed.

Open source solution?

[Scud (1607)]

I don't use Quicken, so I wouldn't know, but is there any reason why the transactions can't be done via FOSS?

Whatever happened..

[Ckwop (707653)]

.. to just producing a decent product and letting the market decide if it wants it or not? Why does every corporation have to be a blood thirsty, morally defunct, money grabing ass?

This is why I choose free software because it's in the spirit of cooperation rather than subversion.

Simon.

Re:Whatever happened..

[by Anonymous Coward]

I used to work for Intuit UK and they were bastards. Just before they pulled their call centre out of the UK and into Canada, they made all the support staff make sales calls.

People were waiting 1-2 hours to get support and there were a hundred people in the queue. Meanwhile the support staff had to make cold calls, which they hated.

Then they suddenley closed the call centre and left all those people without jobs.

I've never bought Intuit products since.

Re:Whatever happened..

[tdemark (512406)]

I used to work for Intuit UK and they were bastards.

Intuit in general are bastards.

Any time you try to import a text transaction file (QFX), the program calls home to see if the organization you downloaded from paid its "Quicken Tax".

When I called tech support because I was getting an error message when trying to import, Intuit told me that "my bank doesn't support Macs", even though I already had the QFX file.

Me: "I don't understand. I have the file, but Quicken won't import it."

Tech: "Your bank doesn't support Macs."

Me: "Why does my bank need to 'support' Macs? I have the text file, but Quicken won't import it."

Think how ridiculous it would be if Excel wouldn't import a CSV file until it called back to MS to verify that author paid an "MS Tax" (insert DRM/Palladium comment here)?

Anyway, I got around the issue by opening the file and changing the "Institution ID" to a bank that has "paid the tax". By simply changing a few characters in the file, Quicken happily imported it.

Re:Whatever happened..

[by Anonymous Coward]

>>Any time you try to import a text transaction file (QFX),
>>the program calls home to see if the organization you downloaded from paid its "Quicken Tax".

I can't stress how true the previous poster's comment is. I lead a team of developers that just finished implementing QFX support for our company, a mid-sized financial institution. The contract terms that Intuit insisted on are truly outrageous. Sure enough, if the customer has a QFX file, but we aren't a "supported" organization, Quicken phones home and will refuse to import the file. This isn't a threat to Quicken users - it's a threat to the *banks*. The amount we had to pay to be "allowed" to continue providing the same support for our customers who had already been downloading QIF files for years was, uh, a LOT. They also strongly "encouraged" us to cripple or disable support for older versions.

During testing, we were not allowed to go live with our upgraded service until we passed their test suites. Problem is, their testing process was neither well-defined nor timely. They promised us a certain scheudle, and then reported "problems" during testing that weren't originally described. When these threatened to delay our production schedule, our customer rep slyly hinted that if we wanted to pay an additional fee, that they could "bump up" our testing in front of other companies. It was a *large* additional fee. It took some high level calls from our management, involving literal screaming, before they would agree to stick to the original schedule.

I am stunned, truly, that Intuit hasn't been held up for antitrust scrutiny at this point. They held financial companies with far more money than them over a barrel, in their latest round of "upgrades". Surely, I keep thinking, it won't be long until some of the big boys round up Intuit and take them out behind the woodshed for a good beating - legal, financial, literal, take your pick.

Re:Whatever happened..

[activewire (515493)]

Agree, mod parent's parent up. This is the REAL story that gets easily lost in slashdot noise.

Intuit can play both ends: they squeeze the customer with forced upgrades, and the banks with "compatibility" policies.

There is no technical reason why my Quicken 2000 stopped importing QFX files on 4/18/2004: the file format hasn't changed. In fact, I can STILL download QFX from my bank and rename the FID (financial instution id) and it works! Its also possible to edit "hosts" file to block the Intuit "phone home"
127.0.0.1 ofx-prod-brand.intuit.com,
127.0.0.1 ofx-prod-fiusage.intuit.com
127.0.0.1 ofx-prod-cuusage.intuit.com

What I dont understand is why banks agree to this?
If every bank would just allow download of OFX from their website, customers could take Intuit's
"branding" servers out of this loop, a place where Intuit never belonged in the first place.

I finally said "screw you Intuit" and have been happily importing OFX files into GnuCash for 6 months.

Re:Whatever happened..

[bersl2 (689221)]

"In [a free-market] economy there is one and only one social responsibility of business to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition, without deception and fraud." -- Milton Friedman

The problem is that, of course, few of them do go without "deception and fraud."

Re:Whatever happened..

[Colonel Cholling (715787)]

That's the biggest pile of market-worshipping crap I've heard in a long time. By this token, plantation owners were completely justified in using slave labor because they were completely honest about the fact that they were using slaves.

The decisions made by businesses affect more than just their own bottom line. There's a whole world full of people there, outside the boardroom, and no matter what Mr. Friedman says, you have certain social responsibilities to them as a human being.

Re:Whatever happened..

[abe ferlman (205607)]

Another problem is that corporations are treated as Natural Persons under U.S. law, so they have basically all the rights of people and few of the responsibilities.

Another problem is that the free market has a very difficult time with the tragedy of the commons problem- short term corporate gain all too often conflicts with long term social and environmental well being.

There are more problems. And don't get me started on the incompatibility of idea ownership and competition.

Equivalent of Orphaned FOSS Projects

[reallocate (142797)]

Doctorow, et al, are exercising their free market power by switching to something else. That's how competition works. Intuit did something that they don't like and they are going elsewhere. What subsequently happens to Intuit is irrelevant to them, even if they agree with you that it is "a blood thirsty, morally defunct, money grabing ass".

Unless Doctorow signed a contract with Intuit obligating it to maintain that service forever, without change, there's little he can do about it other than go elsewhere.

Troll Article

[jdhutchins (559010)]

This article made a good point, but michael didn't have to add his flamebait last line. When you buy something, you usually expect it to keep working and not be disabled over time. Yes, maybe corporations are evil, but for the most part, when you buy something, it keeps working. I have a computer running Windows 95 that runs just as well as when we first bought it. That's coming from Microsoft, the Big Evil. We read the summaries to start discussions ourselves, not to have incendiary statements put in there just for the fun of it.

On a side note, is anyone here a laywer who knows about retail law? There could very well be a law that they're breaking here, opening themselves up to a class-action lawsuit.

Re:Troll Article

[by Anonymous Coward]

Actually, this article doesn't even make a good point. Way to go michael. As usual your over-enthusiasm for yellow "journalism" has run amuck and the worst kind of lies are now being discussed as truth.

As it stands, users of existing Quicken products prior to the Quicken 2005 edition are being "forced" to upgrade to Quicken 2005 because Quicken ended their long-time relationship with Checkfree Corp. sometime last year. Checkfree provided the backend online bill payment features in the Quicken products originally, but Intuit, unsatisfied with the cost of Checkfree's services decided to choose a different vendor to provide this type of feature in their upcoming 2005 version. Intuit decided to not continue the relationship with Checkfree for users who did not want to upgrade to the new product, so Intuit had to "force" upgrades for users who still wanted to use the online bill pay features of the Quicken products. Therefore, if you had purchased Quicken 2000 - Quicken 2004 (I think?) the upgrade to Quicken 2005 Basic (or Standard?) was free. All you had to do as a user was request an upgrade CD from Quicken. Sure, some people don't want to change their software package when the old one works just fine, which is why Intuit keeps sending current customers of their older software these notices that they need to upgrade. In other words, Intuit is saying: "If you want to keep using the Bill Pay features of our Quicken software, you MUST upgrade to our latest version so that our new backend payments processor can start sending your payments for you." Maybe that's a not-so-smart business move for Intuit to make, or maybe they aren't clearly communicating that the reason for the forced upgrade is for the online payments engine issue, but it's certainly not illegal or deceptive. They can't use Checkfree to process their payments anymore, period. So users need to upgrade to keep using that feature.

Now I will disclose that I do not work for Quicken, but do work for a player in the "financial services" industry, so when it comes to this stuff, I know what I'm talking about. I'm more concerned about why /. continues to employ this POS, michael. He is the reason that people call people who love Linux "GNU hippies." He is such a freaking joke! Not only does he make sure to post unverified, inflammatory "articles" submitted by similarly-minded /.'ers as himself, but he also continuously feels the need to add those shitty little quips on to the end of the article which he clearly never reads, and NEVER verifies for accuracy. I call BIG FAT BULL SHIT on this "article!"

Re:Troll Article

[Gudlyf (544445)]

"I'm more concerned about why /. continues to employ this POS, michael."

Are you kidding? Lots of readers eat this kind of thing up. You read the article and disagreed with its message, so you read the coments to see if others have your point of view. Now you might post a reply to the article voicing your disagreement. Then you come back to see what people had to say about your comments, maybe posting another reply or two. The fact is, it incited interest and made people come back to "see what happens next," over and over again, which is what makes Slashdot make money afterall.

Why do they continue to employ michael? Sadly he will probably get a bonus for this.

Re:MOD RACIST PARENT DOWN

[Bendy Chief (633679)]

"Yellow journalism" refers to the use of yellow ink in the printing of an old sensationalist newspaper, The New York World.

It was brought to the pinnacle of sleaziness by William Randolph Hearst, who used his empire to destroy the hemp industry, foster anti-immigrant sentiment, and commit numerous other evils.

I realize it sounds racist, but it ain't.

Re:MOD RACIST PARENT DOWN

[imperious_rex (845595)]

Yes, you should be offended. Racism is *everywhere*. Here's some examples of insidious racism that has crept into our lives:

white sale
white paper
white-out
"Dreaming of a White Christmas"

blackboard
black-out
blacklist
Black Forest
Black Sea
"Paint it Black"

brown bag
brown-out
Charlie Brown
UPS's "What can brown do for you?" ads

yellow journalism
yellow as slang for "cowardice"
yellow birch
yellow dog contract
yellow fever

pinky
pinko

and that's just the tip of the iceberg! For those who find racism in anything that refers to colors found in human pigmentation, life is a never ending struggle to avoid being offended. Your plight has touched us all.

Re:Troll Article

[bwy (726112)]

This article made a good point, but michael didn't have to add his flamebait last line. We read the summaries to start discussions ourselves, not to have incendiary statements put in there just for the fun of it.

Thank you. Very well put and I hope the point is taken.

Re:Troll Article

[TFGeditor (737839)]

"...michael didn't have to add his flamebait last line. "

Michael has become increasingly militant and unshy about exposing his bias. I cannot help but wonder why, and whether someone in authority will call him down in the name of presenting at least some semblance of credibility on /.

What does the contract say?

[l2718 (514756)]

Quoth the editor: "Why the BoingBoing submitter and Mr. Doctorow are so upset about this I don't know; when you buy software that's dependent on a for-profit company to keep working, what do you expect?"

You should expect the price of the software to reflect what is actually being offered. The contract between Intuit and the users regarding the operation of the software should (part of the "Software License Agreement", which I cannot find on-line) should say for how long Quicken will support the operation of the software. That factor was included in the price of the software.

Before this can be resolved we need to look at the contract. Then there are two possibilities:

1. The users failed to read the contract before accepting it -- their loss
2. The company is reneging on an express contract
3. The contact did not spell this out. Then there would be an argument as to what is the implied expectation -- what do you think?

Can someone post the relevant terms from the agreement?

Strategies for a constant cashflow

[acostin (229653)]

I am also managing a software company (we produce tools for web developers), and there is indeed a need to have a long term-strategy that could lead to a constant cash-flow. We have several tactics in place to help us in this respect:

• Release new major versions of our products each 20 months (as we generate code, the previous version is probably "obsolete" by the time we release the new version - so we don't expect problems in this respect). We also add features each time.
• Horizontal expansion - enter markets that are related to our core markett - in our case, online training, commercial support, book writing.

Intuit is probable facing the same problems (at a bigger scale - they're public company and they have responsibilities for their stockholders). It seems that they have offered the online service for free, planning to get the cashflow from software sales only. Now, as the sales have decreased, they have to find a way to make people upgrade to their latest version, and I personally can't blame them.

You also have to take into account that they are probably still battling Microsoft... I am from Romania, so I'm not very familiar with the limited MS Money success. Is Money still an alternative?

Alexandru

Microsoft Money does this, too

[cygnusx (193092)]

From http://www.microsoft.com/uk/homepc/money/ProductDe tails.aspx?pid=003 [microsoft.com]:

Internet-based services available for two (2) years after activation of Microsoft Money or 1 September 2007, whichever is earlier. See the Microsoft Money Internet-based services policy http://money.msn.com/Money/2005/GBR/IBSP.asp [msn.com] for details.

If you don't upgrade, you'll be able to use the software as before, but not the Internet-based services (AFAIK).

I work at a bank

[aardwolf64 (160070)]

I work at a financial institution and am in charge of support for PFMs (Personal Finance Managers) including Microsoft Money and Quicken. The reason that Quicken is sunsetting support for online banking in 2001 and 2002 is that your online transactions actually come through Intuit's server, which accesses your bank server on your behalf. You can still use the older versions of Quicken, you just can't download transactions.

Microsoft Money on the other hand still works since it connects directly to the bank's OFX server. Although my bank only supports 2001 and newer, we have users that are actually connecting with Money 1999 with no problems.

Re:I work at a bank

[TykeClone (668449)]

It's worse than that.

With our site, older versions of Quicken can still download transactions with no issues - Quicken 2005 and above can not (and money has no issues either). In order to set our site up to allow for Quicken to import transactions, it would cost the bank several thousand dollars (+ several thousand dollars per year!) to gain no functionality. To be honest, it would be just as cost effective to give away copies of MS Money instead of paying Intuit's blackmail.

Intuit is also trying to get into the banking game and become the face of your bank. They're already advertising "Quicken Loans" and I imagine attempting to steer deposits with Quicken.

It comes down to an economic decision by the bank. We give away online banking and bill pay to all who want it (doesn't matter about their accounts or their balances) for free.

If there is any kind of a decent open source financial program available on Windows, please let me know about it so that I can recommend it to our customers!

Almost bought Quicken

[srleffler (721400)]

Well, I'm really glad I read about this on Amazon last week. I was about to buy Quicken, since it's almost free if you're buying Turbo Tax. I knew Intuit was Evil, but this was just too evil for me: they lost the sale and I'm sticking with Microsoft Money. It's a sad day when Microsoft is the lesser of two evils...

You don't have to upgrade

[sd790 (643354)]

I received a similar letter a few weeks back and immediately called my bank to find out if this was really going to affect my ability to use their online banking services. They told me that this will NOT cause any problems and I DON'T have to upgrade to continue using their online banking system. The only thing that I'll lose is my ability to Intuit's help desk, which I'll never do anyways.

Call your bank and check. You probably don't have to bother with it.

That is Incorrect

[aardwolf64 (160070)]

From Quicken's Sunset policy FAQ:

Q: What will happen if I don't upgrade?

A: As of April 19, 2005, in accordance with the Quicken sunset policy, Online Services1 and Live Technical Support2 will no longer be available for Quicken 2001 and 2002 users. This means that you will no longer be able to download financial data into older Quicken software. You will still be able to manually enter your data.

Attempts to use Online Services after April 19, 2005 will result in a variety of program error messages related to the feature or service you try to access.

Quicken's Sunset Policy [intuit.com]

FAQ [intuit.com]

Intuit is not very smart

[TheRealFixer (552803)]

As I recall, a couple years ago Intuit came under fire for their production activation scheme and their draconian copy protection in TurboTax, which secretly installed code in the boot sector of the hard drive to prevent the CD from being copied, but also apparently caused some CD writers drives to stop working properly and was near impossible to get rid of. It turned into a major PR nightmare for them, as word spread quickly across the internet of what TurboTax was doing to people's PCs. A good number of their customers left for TaxCut. Several months later, Intuit was forced to admit publically what a dumb decision it was.

Well, it appears that Intuit did not learn their lesson, as this is likely to turn into another PR nightmare for them. How do companies become so dumb?

This happened with me and Toys 'R Us

[nysus (162232)]

I bought this electronic drum set for my kid at Toys 'R Us. A year, later, this guy in a yellow and orange vest comes to my door with a hammer. I let him in and he proceeds to smash the drums into tiny fragments, making my kid cry. He says, "Sorry, the model of your drum set is out of date. You have to buy the new model." What else could I do? I had to pay another $50 or my kid would go nuts.

Re:This happened with me and Toys 'R Us

[AC-x (735297)]

That's not a particularly good analogy now is it?

They are not remotely disabling your copy of Quicken, they had been providing a service for free as the online bill payment system had to go through their server. They've realised they can't keep doing that forever, but for some reason rather then introducing a small subscription fee they're getting people to upgrade instead.

Could Happen In Open Source, Too

[reallocate (142797)]

Might be bait and switch, might not be.

I don't use Quicken, but if the communication involved is, literally, only between the user and a financial institution, then I'm not sure how that capability could be disabled by Intuit.

If the Quicken relays data to a financial institution via Intuit (why?), then Intuit is within its rights to alter or eliminate that capability. (Doctorow should check the terms of his Terms of Use agreement. I'd be surprised that Intuit agreed to maintain that facility, without change, in perpetuity.)

The same thing could happen in an open source version of Quicken if data was sent to banks via a single central facility, if a code upgrade or rewrite was frustrated by the need to maintain the old code at that real point.

Try MoneyDance

[czei (121516)]

I got fed up with Intuit's bug-ridden software and abysmal tech. support in 2003 and switched to MoneyDance [moneydance.com]. The GUI isn't as slick, but I ended up spending way less time on finances because the program's well-written and well supported. Instead of talking to tech. support people on the other side of the world who are just reading from a support database you can get email back from one of the developer's in a couple of hours and your questions are answered quickly, accurately, and for free.

I looked at some open source programs at the time, but the big draw for me to MoneyDance initially was it will automatically download transactions from my bank, and there's a great matching algorithm to stick the transactions in the right budget category.

Since we're bashing Intuit...

[Deagol (323173)]

Anyone know of a good Paytrust [paytrust.com] alternative?

I was horrified to get a notice from Paytrust recently about them joining with Intuit. I assume they were bought by Intuit.

Intuit has gotten so anti-consumer over the years. I almost wish Microsoft had won the lawsuit between the two companies, just out of spite.

When the Quicken yearly upgrade routine began in the late 90's, I migrated to GNUCash, then evenually went to using a basic OpenOffice spreadsheet for my account handling. I had been a loyal, paying user since the DOS days.

I was a major Turbo Tax paying customer for many years, too. Then they pulled that stupid DRM scheme a few years back. I tried an alternative suggested by a Slashdot poster (Tax Act, I think?), but that was only for a year, as I felt it was an inferior product. The next year, I went to H&R Block, which I'll proabably continue to do until I can file a EZ form again (maybe in a few years).

I absolutely love Paytrust -- I manage all of my bills and loans with it. However, I'm drafting a letter to physically mail to them once I've converted all of my accounts to an alternative or back to the check and post office routine again. I must tell them that Intuit has proven itself to be anti consumer, so I can't in god faith remain with an affiliated company.

I doubt they'll take notice, though. Such a shame.

Re:What Intuit are doing is outrageous

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

Rubbish. You paid for iLife '04, and your copy of iLive '04 does exactly what it was marketed as doing. iLife '05 has more features, and you pay for these (well, you don't, but non-criminals do). If you didn't like the features iLife '04 originally had, you shouldn't have bought it - you should have either bought or written something better. This is entirely different from what Intuit are doing - disabling features that the customer has already paid for.

By the way, the RRP of iLife is £49, so I d

Re:What Intuit are doing is outrageous

[BinLadenMyHero (688544)]

Ok for the features, but he said the new version FIXED PROBLEMS of the old one. He has the right to have the product working as expected, thus to have the problems fixed. If they don't release a 4.1 version that solve that problems, he has the moral right to get a pirate the new version.

Re:Cross-platform alternate - mvelopes

[pkiguruman (413057)]

Does it work with lynx?