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Intuit Sued Over Product Activation
An anonymous reader writes "PCWorld is reporting: [Scott] Leviant's firm of Stanbury & Fishelman has filed a class-action lawsuit against Intuit in Los Angeles Superior Court on behalf of all U.S. purchasers of TurboTax software for the 2002 tax year. The suit alleges that Intuit engaged in unfair and deceptive business practices by failing to fully disclose the mechanisms and consequences of its product-activation technology before consumers pay for the software."
The really annoying part about this stuff is that kids who can file with their parents taxes according to the software, but don't have access to the same computer, can't share the software within the family anymore. I suppose this is what the software company is going for. It must be nice to have a monoply.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Yes, There are several. I use a product called TaxAct. They are located Here
Okay, start taking bets to see if Stanbury and Fishelman will sue Microsoft for their similarly sinister product activation systems.. bet they don't!
I hope someone does - my latest fiasco with this: We have a volume license for XP, and thus should be excluded from activation. But we recently purchased 300 new computers from Dell. The wonderful MS tax kicks in, because you know you can't get a good pc without paying for XP all over again. Of course with this many pcs, I need a ghost image. So I go about my usual routine of setting one up nicely then getting ready for sysprep (don't you just love how sysprep PUTS BACK the MSN and media shortcuts - and those stupid bubble prompts for desk clean up and updates?). After the ghost, the only thing we should have to do is put in the computer name, the answer file takes care of the key codes. But noooooo, a volume license key code is incompatible with preinstalled OS from Dell. But the Dell ones had alredy been activated by them. So that leaves us with
A) - put your software on by hand for each PC - sucks - not gonna happen
B) reformat the hard drive, re-install the truck load of drivers that XP didn't plug-n-play, then go about putting your apps on, then ghost - sucks again - who wants to take a nifty new computer and then just wipe it out?
C) Use the original image, and when the answer file gets stuck at the key code, type in the one on the Dell sticker, then you have to activate it again within 30 days - (we are not even sure if there would be a problem with that, since it was already done) - sucks - tiny numbers out of reach, so it takes almost two ppl to do this. Plus now the number could be tagged to the PC, so you have to keep good inventory of all of this. Nice job again MS - I just love how you are making me work my fanny off. Oh yeah, we went for B - reformat and a big FU.
For us Canucks out here ...
Like the rest of you I got tired of this Intuit crap and started looking for the alternatives last year.
TaxWiz : Used it for my 2001 filing for my family (5 adults). Lousy interface and printing is a royal PITA, but overall did the job. Uh oh, bought by Intuit.
CanTax : Used to sell personal versions for consumers, but now concentrates on tax professionals. Tried out the demo and decided to use it this year. Assumes at least better than novice tax prep knowledge. Pricey ($79 for 15 returns) compared to the consumer level stuff but seems solid.
Dr Tax : Like CanTax, targeted towards the professional tax prep people. Tried the demo -- seems solid enough but too much work if you're not a tax geek.
Anyway, hopefully the field doesn't narrow too much next year!
You know, every time I bitch about my clients unavoidably ending up with multiple Windows licenses for their PCs, some knucklehead posts about how Dell will (for corporate customers) happily install a customer-provided Ghost image or provide naked PCs sans license and OS if you prove the machines are already covered by a preexisting volume license.
I would think that for a customer buying 300 PCs at once, Dell would mention those things to you if they really did offer them.
~Philly
The whole time I've had anything to do with Intuit's products, they have been trying to nickel and dime me to death. I guess I'm smarter than the average Quicken user and anyway it pissed me off enough that I wasn't willing to give in.
Let me count the ways.
With the online banking available for Quicken and Quickbooks, there is a monthly fee. Web banking at all three of the banks I've used since the web has been around has been free.
Quicken comes with tax tables that it will use to calculate payroll withholding, but the tax tables expire after a few months. To get updates to the tax tables, you have to pay for a subscription.
But the information in the tax tables is made available for free by the IRS and each state tax agency, and in fact is printed and mailed to business owners each year at taxpayer expense.
Yet there is no facility for manually entering the tax tables or importing tax table files that could reasonably be downloaded for free off the net.
My business has only one employee (myself) so what I do is work out my withholding in a spreadsheet. I've found that doing the calculation this way helps me understand my taxes better when I'm deciding what to pay myself each time. Fortunately QuickBooks allows me to enter the withholding manually - I wouldn't be suprise if they remove that in the future.
They're constantly trying to sell you preprinted checks and invoice forms. You should be able to print nice invoices from QuickBooks on an inkjet printer without using preprinted forms, but there is no facility for designing the invoices. So what I usually do is type up an invoice and email it to my clients; if they want a hardcopy I use a wordprocessor. That works out for me because I don't invoice clients very frequently - it wouldn't work for a retail store.
If you reinstall Quickbooks after reinstalling your OS or move it to a new machine, you have to reactivate the product. My copy of Quickbooks doesn't have the horrible activation scheme this article is about, but what is a pain is that after activating it a couple times, you're told that the product is in use and it won't reactivate. You have to call tech support to get a code to reactivate it.
Fortunately I now have this code written down so I can reactivate it myself. But you know, I paid for the product, I should be able to use it without registering it. They have my damn money.
The last straw for me was that earlier this year, Intuit canceled support for QuickBooks 99's online banking. I got spammed with upgrade notices every time I logged on before this happened. After it happened I canceled my online banking and now I just use the web banking.
I have come to the conclusion that online banking like Quicken and Quickbooks have is just not that good an idea. The whole time I've used both products I have had trouble with my accounts not balancing right. Now that I reconcile my accounts manually with my bank statements, and so am much more careful about it than the supposedly convenient online banking, I have been able to get my books to balance exactly.
I used TurboTax a couple times. I didn't like it the first time I used it, but I used it a second year because I was out of the country and wanted to file online.
First, I think it's pretty damn useless. To handle the schedule C, business income, it asks such meaningful questions as "enter your business expenses" - but you have to figure that out yourself without using turbotax. It's just as easy to enter it on a paper form.
Last year my taxes were much more complicated because I now own a house and so am itemizing deductions, but I found that while doing my taxes by hand, without using software, I was able to claim a deduction that saved significant money. Turbotax would never have found that deduction.
(What I did was have my corporation pay rent to me personally for rental of my home office. But I would have to pay taxes on the rental income. What I was able to do was to depreciate the portion of my home used for business purposes. The maximum depreciation allowed was the business income on the property - which was the total amount of the rent. So I was able to pay myself the home office rental tax-free, I won't have to pay taxes on the rent for decades. The IRS had no complaint about this. Turbotax wouldn't have been able to deal with it.)
I just plain feel that it's wrong for a software publisher to require me to activate a product before I can use it, and so I will never knowingly purchase a software product that requires it. That means I'm never going to install Windows XP. Also I'm never going to install service pack 3 on my Win2k box, because of the EULA.
Finally, I'd like to suggest that if any of you work for companies that have staff attorneys, that you suggest to the attorneys that they require attorney approval of EULAs before any software gets installed. If enough companies start doing that, the current nonsense that passes for a license agreement will get set straight pretty quick - imagine if General Motors wasn't willing to use Windows because their staff attorneys objected to the license agreement!
Request your free CD of my piano music.
BS.
I finished a 1-year contract for a fortune 10 company who, of course, farmed all coding out to India. They turned out nothing but crap that rendered the appservers useless due to infinite loops, memory leaks, and a plethora of newb errors.
As much money was spent on on-shore people to fix those problems as was spent on the bad code itself, but no one ever actually LEARNED from this and had the on-shore guys just DO the coding.
God that pisses me off.
A couple weeks ago I was shopping at my local grocery superstore and picked up a copy of TurboTax Basic from a display next to the service counter. I usually have one of those *block services prepare my taxes, and it usually costs $75 or more in fees. I really didn't put much thought into buying TurboTax. An hour later I fired up the Windows2000Pro laptop I have an slipped in the CD. The next 3 hours was an amazing lack of progress at getting the thing installed, and 3 support sessions with the company involving uncounted people on their end and a fun phone bill for me.
The cause of my problems are the partition scheme of my laptop. The Windows2000Pro system C: partition is 900MB, just big enough for the OS and some temp files. The swapfile is on another larger partition, as are all third-party applications.
The "Minimum System Requirements" on the box (a DVD-style clamshell) are easy to read through the shrinkwrap. To summarize the relevant parts, the OS list included Windows2000, the hard disk space specified 65MB and an additional 60MB if IE was not installed. IE 5.5 or higher was listed as being required to access online features, obtain product updates, and complete electronic filing. I read this before buying, and noted that my system meets all the requirements given on the box.
On insertion, the CD autorun process kicked up a splash window, then an animated install menu window. I clicked the obvious choice to register and install, followed the prompts through selecting my type of network connection, filling out the registration info and getting to a window with a single button to "Install." Clicking the install button got me a window where the file copying process is obviously supposed to happen, but instead I get a standard alery window that informs me that there is insufficient space on the hard disk to install.
Some notable things at this point: I have never been presented a EULA of any type. None of the windows I have progressed through have displayed a EULA, nor has there been any possible sequence of buttons that makes one appear. There is no EULA in the printed material inside the box. I have also not entered the CD key code anywhere in the process. There is no prompt for it anywhere up to this point, not even in the registration window where I entered my name/address/email type info. This becomes interesting in another hour or so when I'm on the phone with their support staff.
I'm now at the point where the TurboTax installer will not proceed further because I do not have 191MB available on drive C:. I want to install on drive E: which has plenty of space, so I consulted the FAQ on the turbotaxsupport.com website. I didn't find anything applicable, so decided to consult a support staffer about the best way to make this happen. (They use a webchat interface to provice frontline support.) The live person on the other end directed me to the web FAQ with a set of steps for installing from hard disk instead of CD, involving simply copying the CD installer files to the HD. Doubtful, I tried it anyway, and was not surprised when the installer still stubbornly insisted that there was not enough space because it was only scanning the C: drive. I still had the webchat window open, which gave me an option to select that I was unsatisfied with the help I was given and offered me a chance to talk with a "senior" support staffer via webchat. I muttered "hell yes" and was shortly explaining the problem all over again to a new person. I was walked 4 times through the complete process, echoing the window headings and options at each step laboriously. None of the suggestions made were helpful, and few even made any sense at all. At one point I was even told that the only solution would be to uninstall and then reinstall. I reminded him politely that getting the product installed in the first place was the whole point of this exercise, and asked how I could possibly uninstall when nothing has been installed even once yet. I was then treated like a fencepost and told to find the TurboTax menu under Program Files from the Start menu, at which point I seriously wondered what problem the support staffer thought we were trying to fix. (Of course there was no entry under the start menu.) Finally after convincing him that the product was in fact not installed at all, not even a little bit, and could not be uninstalled, he gave up and provided me with a voice toll number and PIN. I asked for a toll free number but was told none exists. Ouch, since I was envisioning a lengthy call if my experience so far proved typical. I decided to take this as far as it goes.
I had no problems getting to a live person quickly. He seemed to understand the nature of the problem and over the course of the next hour I had a pretty dizzy ride as I was asked the same questions repeatedly and he was consulting with an increasing number of people on his end. I had some pointed questions about the minimum requirements listed on the box, such as why the installer wanted 191MB in the first place, since the requirements plainly state 65MB. I was told that the higher amount was due to not having IE 6.0 installed. I pointed out that the IE requirement on the box stated 5.5 or higher, not that 6.0 was needed. I was told that was true, but if 6.0 is not present the installer will install it. I pointed out that the box said that only 60MB more was needed for IE if it was not present, which means a total of 125MB minimum requirement and asked why 66MB more than that was needed. I didn't get an answer to that. I asked him to confirm that IE 6.0 was required, contrary to what the box said. I was told that IE 6.0 is needed, but he stopped short of giving me an actual confirmation that the box was wrong. I asked him to confirm that the requirements on the box were wrong specifically regarding HD space and IE version, and he went on hold for a while. When he came back he asked me if I read the EULA, as all these facts were in the EULA. I told him I hadn't read the EULA and asked where I could find it, at the same time pointing out that it was irrelevant since I had no way to read system requirements prior to purchase other than on the outside of the box. He told me I must have seen the EULA, it was on the third window of the install process. I told him I didn't remember clicking past it, and by now I had gone through these steps many times. I did it again for him, step by step, this time saying "no EULA" after describing every window. When we got all the way to the diskspace alert, there had been no EULA presented. I pointed out that anything in the EULA couldn't possibly apply to me since it never made an appearance. He never mentioned the EULA again.
At one point or another in the phone conversation I was told the following things, all of which turned out to be false:
That I wasn't being presented all the installer windows because I didn't have IE 6.0 installed.
That the EULA was presented on the third window and before the registration form.
That it was possible to install my E: drive regardless of available space on C:
The end result seemed to be that the installer scans the C: drive before offering an option to specify the location for installation, which they agreed was stupid. They insisted that after that space check there is a prompt that allows changing the installation location, but you can't get there if you don't have enough space for the entire installation on the C: drive. They also changed their minds about how the IE installer worked, and said that it offers a choice to not upgrade to IE 6.0, but obviously not before the space check. I have my doubts, since the disk space alert pops up at the beginning of the file copy process, with the progress bar ready to start counting files. I'm not sure where they are fitting in the choices for install location and options, but it sure doesn't seem to be before the initial file copy. This implies to me that it always needs 191MB on the C: drive to install, no matter what the environment is, which is still 66MB more than the requirements stated on the box. I hope it's not so, but I doubt I'll ever see for myself. I'm not repartitioning my system to accomodate a single proprietary tax program.
I know my experience surely isn't typical. Most people have 200MB or more free on their C: drive. I just don't have the extra space to waste on my laptop for a Windows system partition, and this shouldn't be about how I partition my machine. There were several humorous points for me in the conversations, I think the funniest was when I was told by one of their "experts" to relabel my drives to swap E: and C: just for the install and then switch them back. I had to keep from laughing as I explained that I couldn't change the letter of a running system boot partition, and even if I could the system likely would die immediately and certainly wouldn't be bootable in that condition. Another funny one was the idea that "minimum system requirements" meant only those needed to run the application, but not to install it. Their argument was that the installer temporarily needs more than the minimum requirements during installation, but that the program would run fine with the listed requirements. I believe that is an unreasonable position.
I was given an address to return the product for a refund and cut loose. I came away with several concerns, especially surrounding the EULA (or apparent lack of one) and the listed minimum system requirements, which are misleading at best and untruthful at worst. It's bad enough that a product requires you to buy it before you can read the EULA, and we're used to that. But for the CD-based installer to require you to register the product before you can even install it, and doesn't even show you the EULA until after it copies the product to your hard disk is pretty bad in my opinion. Perhaps I should count myself fortunate that I never got far enough to see the EULA.