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Updating Quickbooks Forces Online Membership?

Posted by Cliff on from the limiting-the-previous-feature-set dept.

garyebickford asks: "I've been using Quickbooks 2001 for a long time, sending out invoices via email. A couple of months ago it asked if I wanted to do an online update - these occurred occasionally and I agreed. There was no information regarding what the update would do, although IIRC there was some mention of 'new features' and 'improvements'. Since that time, it is now impossible to either fax or email an invoice without signing up for Quickbook's 'Online Business Member' program since it appears to use their own mail server. Membership is free for now, but the required click-agreement forces me to agree in advance to any future fees! I have no interest in letting Intuit know about my invoices and other financial information. As a result, this software is essentially useless and I must find a new accounting package. I've looked at various OSS packages but haven't found one that has developed far enough to use in this way. But there are many out there and I haven't kept up to date, so maybe someone else out there can suggest something. I'd prefer using it on Linux, of course. I'd also be interested if this loss of functionality would be sufficient to consider a class action suit to recover costs of conversion." The issue at hand is that commercial software has started to force consumers to fall into such schemes to maintain features that they already had. Today it is Quickbooks, but what about tomorrow?

5 of 441 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Quickbooks disabled? noooooo...... by Jucius+Maximus · · Score: 5, Funny
    "No tax tables makes Quickbooks about as useless as tits on a boar hog."

    Clearly, you have never owned a boar hog ;-)

  2. Re:It's true by yasth · · Score: 4, Funny

    RealOne Enterprise Desktop is a nice alternative to RealPlayer.

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  3. Re:My bad experience with Inuit products by Dirtside · · Score: 5, Funny

    Look, just because the Inuit live in a relatively primitive society doesn't mean you have to denigrate them. I mean, come on, have you ever even tried seal blubber soup?

    Wait... did you mean Intuit? Oh, well, that's different then.

    --
    "Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
  4. Re:Easy... by AntiNorm · · Score: 4, Funny

    Uninstall, reinstall, patch up to the level that caused the problem, and be happy with it.

    You mean like what you do with Windows?

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  5. Richard Stallman told you this would happen. by paynter · · Score: 5, Funny

    And everyone called him a radical.