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?

Comments

And what alternative do you have?

[blowdart]

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?

[rah1420]

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 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.

Open source solution?

[Scud]

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]

.. 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..

[bersl2]

"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:Why not GnuCash?

[blowdart]

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

[jdhutchins]

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

[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

[bwy]

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

[omb]

There are a number of points here:

(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:Troll Article

[Gudlyf]

"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:Why not GnuCash?

[Rich0]

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:I work at a bank

[TykeClone]

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!

Re:Why not GnuCash?

[scarolan]

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.

Re:Why not GnuCash?

[Tim C]

Quicken doesn't run on Linux. Therefore, anyone currently using Quicken almost certainly isn't running Linux. Gnucash doesn't run on anything but Linux.

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...

Re:Parent Assumption Wrong, Article Correct (gasp)

[Thing 1]

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.