Intuit Disables Features in Quicken To Force Upgrades 617
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?
And what alternative do you have? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Open source solution? (Score:3, Insightful)
Whatever happened.. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why I choose free software because it's in the spirit of cooperation rather than subversion.
Simon.
Re:Why not GnuCash? (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Troll Article (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
official line? (Score:2, Insightful)
<sarcasm>In either case, I believe we should be reactionary and attack Intuit, just like we do every year about this time. They did add DRM stuff to TurboTax one year. Bastards.</sarcasm >
(I do remember them pulling the DRM or whatever stuff from TurboTax. Maybe they'll do the right thing here. But since I don't have enough info, I don't know the right thing. So I won't jump on this bandwagon. Yet.
What does the contract say? (Score:3, Insightful)
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:
Can someone post the relevant terms from the agreement?
hmm (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, I don't expect this, it's definitely not a standard industry practice. Oh, sorry, forgot that rationality takes a back seat when it's time to insult proprietary software.
Almost bought Quicken (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What Intuit are doing is outrageous (Score:3, Insightful)
By the way, the RRP of iLife is £49, so I don't know how you paid £99 for it. Education price is even lower, and the 5-license family pack is only £65.
Re:Whatever happened.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that, of course, few of them do go without "deception and fraud."
Then what about CodeWeavers? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why not GnuCash? (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Bank Web sites & paying online (Score:3, Insightful)
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:This happened with me and Toys 'R Us (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:What Intuit are doing is outrageous (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And what alternative do you have? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Equivalent of Orphaned FOSS Projects (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
The equivalent ahppens in FOSS every day as developers abandon projects and leave behind orphaned software. Cooperation doesn't get you much when no one wants to coppoerate.
Re:Troll Article (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Troll Article (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you. Very well put and I hope the point is taken.
Re:Whatever happened.. (Score:3, Insightful)
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:I work at a bank (Score:4, Insightful)
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!
Re:Whatever happened.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Whatever happened.. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why not GnuCash? (Score:3, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Troll Article (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:And what alternative do you have? (Score:3, Insightful)
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% free (ok they can charge me to do an instant payment) people will be usining paper checks.
there is a law that states they can not charge you to accept your payment. This law needs to be expanded to online payments.
Re:Why not GnuCash? (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you seriously suggesting that Quicken users should switch not only application but OS? Most of these people are going to be non-technical, and not exactly comfortable switching one thing at once, let alone two...
Die Intuit Die! (Score:3, Insightful)
In an ongoing effort to provide reliable high-quality products and services, Intuit periodically retires (also known as "sunsets") older versions of Quicken, thereby discontinuing Online Services & Live Technical Support for these versions.
Under this policy, the most current version of Quicken (currently Quicken 2005), plus the prior two versions, will be supported, subject to certain exceptions. Sunsetting older versions of Quicken allows us to focus resources on enhancing our products and providing support for more current versions, which are used by the vast majority of Quicken customers. The result: a better customer experience for millions of Quicken users.
They're making it sound like some sort of political decision... "for the greater good!"
What a bunch of assholes. You're a business. You sold a product. Now you're trying to take it back by disabling features that people have already paid for. You just can't polish that kind of turd.
I have Quicken 2005 (bought before I knew about this crap). And it no longer supports importing QIFs from my credit union. I asked my credit union about it, and they said Intuit wants somewhere around $50,000 to enable the new format.
Intuit needs to die.
Re:Troll Article (Score:3, Insightful)
(1) I used to rely, and would like to continue to rely on /. to alert me to interesting news.
(2) The quality of the 'news selection' is going down.
(3) I am sick of egregious op-ed, trolls, astroturfers, shills and idiots who dont know when to keep their fingers still, off the keyboard.
The bottom line these days is that it is getting harder and harder to get FACTS, not subjective opinions, and there are far too many un-funny FUNNY posts.
All that said Intuit is behaving atrociously by egregiously breaking the functionality that their users have already paid for. This is certainly illegal at Roman Common Law, all of Europe, and in the UK, also, like the US, an Anglo-Saxon Common law jurisdiction; Unfair Contract Terms kills any EULA, then tortious damage!
The real problem here, once again, is the flacidity of the US legal system, in which lower court judges almost never rule quickly and definitively for fear of reversal on appeal, which I am told is a judicial career-damaging position.
I say to all of you in the US, again, that your problem is the practise of the courts, which now denies justice to you all. When you do Tort reform adopt the UK convention that the looser pays all party-and-party costs for both parties. That together with an O.16 practise rule for summary judgement and provision for security as to costs would, _at_once_, stifle vexatious lawsuits like SCO, disposed of in Germany in under a month, and make the likes of Intuit rightly fear their user base far too much to even think of trying this kind of thing.
Incedentally, it would also solve, or at least seriously ameliorate the current IP rustling/patent malpractice since corporations would have a strong dis-incentive to vexatiously defend nugatory IP in the courts and both the RIAA and MPIAA would both have to think hard about issuing suit without up-front evidence. You might have to fix your discovery rule to prevent 'fishing' without a statement of claim backed by prima facie evidence disclosing a cause of action.
Finally, I am also getting very tired of people quoting, wrongly, the mantra of US Capitalism,
The only responsibility is to make a shareholder profit unsaid, in the short term.
When history reflects the 1990s flawed vision of Sharelolder Value will, I suspect, mark the beginning of the decline of the US economy. It is certainly responsible for Enron, the banking and insurance scandels
Re:What does the contract say? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's NOT just the Quicken Upgrade! (Score:3, Insightful)
So a $19 upgrade to Quicken can end up forcing the purchase of a $1000 new computer ... and some of your other software will have problems running in it so it needs to be upgraded too.
Re:Alternatives (Score:3, Insightful)
I do this stuff for a living. And I've never sold a product to a customer and given them an end-of-life (EOL) schedule at the same time. It doesn't work that way, mainly because you're never exactly sure when your EOL date needs to be. Sure, you have some guesses, but often they're wrong.
Very good reasons for product EOL are declining demand and support/maintenance costs. Tech. support and software maintenance cost real money, and if a company is seeing usage of a product drop off, why support it? Tell your user base, 'listen, you got 4 years out of a $50 product, that's pretty good. Upgrade for a discount and let's get you on something modern that makes both of our lives easier. If not, hey, good luck.'
Companies are not obligated to support/deliver product in perpetuam, else they'd be flat-ass broke. It's not fraud: trust me, there's enough legalese, and this is a common-enough and accepted practice, that it's perfectly legal. Do open-source developers support 10-year-old code builds, when modern stuff is better and more popular?
And yes, MS will eventually drop support on XP, when the time is appropriate for them. Just like they did Win95 and WFW. 'course, at that point, they may stop checking authentication on older SW, as the market will ensure that you upgrade to support new software/hardware. Who knows.
Re:And what alternative do you have? (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you use debit or credit cards in stores or restaurants? If so you are trusting the clerk or waiter not to make a copy of your card information and to appropriately handle any receipts containing your information. Again, I think that is a higher risk activity than encrypted communications to a server where your transactions generally don't require anonymous human handling.
Do you mail your bills? By this, I'm asking if you take a slip of paper covered with your finanicial account information (i.e., a paper check) and stick it in an envelope (which stands out as a bill payment) and then stick it in an unlocked box by the side of the road with a FLAG STICKING UP to announce that something valuable might be housed within?
Personally, I think online bill payments are one of the safest means now available for handling financial transactions. The other methods send way too much of your sensitive information in cleartext through one or more anonymous sets of human hands as well as providing opportunities for malicious interception along the way.
Re:Parent Assumption Wrong, Article Correct (gasp) (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Troll Article (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
What about the backup files? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have been banking at a large institution for many years now and, since they don't directly support Macintosh computers, I have downloaded the equivilent of a backup file to do online banking. The bank also allows me to do electronic bill-pay from their interface, so to have Quicken do it (as opposed to just record it) is not necessary.
I have no need to upgrade to Intuit's current application because of that, unless or until they change the format of their backup file (the extension is .QIF).
So for banks that allow you to download .QIF files instead of using the Quicken electronic transfer interface, the old versions may continue to be quite useful.
Re:Whatever happened.. (Score:3, Insightful)
As for not doing anything before, I think a simple example will suffice: You are driving in your car, and you pass a person on the side of the road, working on their car. That person is obviously in distress, but it is not critical. However, if you are driving and you see an major accident occur in front of you, you would at the very least call 911 or some aid (if it were safe for you to do so).
Don't get me wrong - I agree a lot with you, but it is more of a shading of your statements.
Re:Alternatives (Score:1, Insightful)
I swear, you people seem to need explanations in words of two syllables or less.
Quicken does not need to communicate with Intuit in order to provide online banking services. It doesn't cost them anything to allow their products to continue to work. This is nothing but a shakedown.
Darn... I guess I used a couple of three-syllable word above, but there's always dictionary.com.
Re:corporatist (Score:2, Insightful)
You could easily follow that logic right into the open source world; not everyone is perfect and some people are downright ruthless.
I guess we see where Michael's possy of blind followers resides, which keeps his extremely biased postings on Slashdot's front page.As a side note, when these posts are made I generally first consider the companies history and in this case I had never heard of anything bad coming from Quicken, so I honestly assumed that this was just another complaint from a disgruntled customer that was probably caught doing something he shouldn't (look at all of the baseless lawsuits against everything for my reasoning there, even though this was not a lawsuit). After reading Intuit's own website on sunsetting or whatever they called it, the policy does seem harsh, but in order to keep pace with technology I do admit it may be necessary (as crappy as that sounds). Banks don't want out dated and unnecessary duplication and we don't need multiple routes into the bank. Now, I say that more from the banking perspective than the user's perspective because I would be just as pissed if I did my own finances with Quicken. As a programmer, the idea of removing features that are not broken sounds a bit rediculous and I cannot imagine Intuit getting away with this policy. The company is making a mistake here, in my opinion, and it would seem more honest and make more sense if they asked the banks to make the announcement that the banks would stop supporting older versions of Quicken. Long story short, that's the only morally acceptable route in my book on this page, but I do feel Michael has a problem with posting extreme bias that usually defies logic.
Software update ripoffs (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Troll Article (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, come on. It wouldn't be Slashdot if michael didn't always tack some flamebait onto the last line of a story submission. He does it CONSTANTLY.
I think it's time for me to head over to my Preferences page and change them not to show any stories with michael in the byline. Long overdue, actually.
Re:This happened with me and Toys 'R Us (Score:1, Insightful)
So, once they decide it has been long enough since you bought your old version and now you need to shell out more to get the same functionality, they disable the service for the older versions.
The point is, the service doesn't have to be this way. It's only there to force consumers to get a newer version of Quicken! They could easily have written it to allow consumers to talk directly to banks... but then the consumers wouldn't need them anymore. It's planned obsolensce.