A personal gripe

For years now I have organised my business finances using Quickbooks, and my personal finances using Quicken.  Setting it up was a bit of a task at first, but then it hummed along without complaint for years.  My banking  and credit card transactions loaded in each month with a click of a button. All my bills were paid either automatically, or with a click of a button.  I have not actually written out a check in years.

All this bliss came to a screeching halt recently. Intuit, the maker of quicken told me I had to upgrade to the latest version to continue using their online bill pay system. I was angry, but frankly too invested in the system to balk.  So I paid them more money and took the update.  Then the second and more dire issue hit: Quicken’s new improved version no longer accepted inputs in the formats provided by my bank and credit card companies. This leaves me either the option of keying in every transaction (not going to happen) or hoping that Intuit’s market share will force my financial institutions to adopt Intuit’s new format. I’m glad I am not the only one upset with this:

Boing Boing: Quicken disables the software you paid for to force paid upgrades:

Intuit has lost a customer on this one. Make that two customers — for life. This is the dirtiest of pool imaginable. Bait-and-switch. I wonder if it’s even legal. You’d think that if Intuit had actually made a compelling new product that it could entice its customers to buy an upgrade; seems like they’ve decided that instead of improving their products, they’ll just extort money from customers who were stupid enough to buy from them in the first place. That’s a mistake I imagine very few of us will make again once word of this gets out.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 30th, 2005 at 11:52 am and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.