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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?
Why not use GnuCAsh? It's so difficult to integrate with online banking?
http://www.michel.eti.br
I used to work for Intuit UK and they were bastards. Just before they pulled their call centre out of the UK and into Canada, they made all the support staff make sales calls.
People were waiting 1-2 hours to get support and there were a hundred people in the queue. Meanwhile the support staff had to make cold calls, which they hated.
Then they suddenley closed the call centre and left all those people without jobs.
I've never bought Intuit products since.
Intuit is probable facing the same problems (at a bigger scale - they're public company and they have responsibilities for their stockholders). It seems that they have offered the online service for free, planning to get the cashflow from software sales only. Now, as the sales have decreased, they have to find a way to make people upgrade to their latest version, and I personally can't blame them.
You also have to take into account that they are probably still battling Microsoft... I am from Romania, so I'm not very familiar with the limited MS Money success. Is Money still an alternative?
Alexandru
There's no guarantee of security no matter how you do your banking. A major bank in Canada (CIBC) lost a lot of credibility when it was discovered they'd (mistakenly) been sending customer records, unshredded, to a junk yard somewhere in the United States.
The sad part is the junk yard owner was calling the bank for two years to report this to them, and they didn't listen.
When the guy finally called the media, CIBC sued the junk yard owner!
And since when has software not relied on a for-profit company? I use a mix of F/OSS and proprietary software. My rule is that I use whatever gives me the best result for my money (considering the value of my time+cost of software).
Personally, since it was already installed on my machine Windows XP Pro works fine for me. I've tried Linux several times. I have a degree in Electrical Engineering and it still requires more time to figure out than I care to put into it. If I have to put more than a couple of hours of effort into setting it up/using it/learning the other software it's NOT cost-effective for me to install. I'm better off buying proprietary software like Windows XP that I think works better out of the box than Linux. (Disclaimer: that was a personal opinion, I respect other's different opinions on the issue.)
On ther other hand, Firefox is great, it's free, and it was initially supported by a for-profit company, Netscape, releasing some source code and opening it up. The Linux distributors, Red Hat et al, provide some support (albeit indirectly) to Linux. If they weren't able to make a buck on Linux, it'd be a different piece of software today. So even free software gets some support from for-profit companies.
Until F/OSS software applications provide the same kind of reliability/usability as proprietary software then I will to continue to evaluate each piece of software on it's merits, not just on the fact I save a few bucks and have the "comfort" of knowing I can modify it if I need to.
This is consumer fraud at its worst. My guess is Intuit is in a cash squeeze and needs to raise some $$$ fast.
We're going to see the same thing in a few years when Microsoft starts refusing to issue activation keys when you reinstall XP because it too will be EOL'ed.
Yes, over time, a company or a project has to move forward. Sometimes that leaves older versions out in the dark.
In this case, there is no evil plot. The upgrade to Quicken 2005 is free. They should have mailed you a CD. If they haven't, there is a very obvious way to contact Intuit; from the Quicken Bill Pay home page:
"To continue accessing your account, you must install your free copy of Quicken 2005 Premier* and upgrade to the improved Quicken Bill Pay.
[filling removed by me]
* If you have not received or have misplaced the new software we sent you, and/or the letter that came with it, please call us toll-free at 1-877-486-8844 for further instructions.
robert
Yes, I've known that for a while, every time you perform an online transaction, even a statment download initiated from your banks website, quicken always connects to intuit, but you can block quicken from connecting to intuit.com if you use a personal firewall, and still dnload your transactions. When you attempt to download your transactions to Quicken, the fw pops up a notice that quicken wants to connect to some intuit.com website, eventhough I am connecting to my bank instead, and do I want to continue. I click NO and the transactions are still downloaded.
Ok, try THIS then.
Intuit originally released QuickBooks Pro 2001 with the ability to send invoices via SMTP. This was great, and was one of the reasons I actually upgraded to QB 2001. A year or so later, Intuit pushed out a patch that REMOVED that feature -- you had to instead sign up for the "free" service at Intuit, and send all your invoices through THEM. That was bad enough, but later on, they made it so that you had to PAY for the service.
Intuit is a bunch of bastards. I like their products, but I hate them...
The feature though is not a feature of software but a service that you've bought. They are not disabling any feature that does not require accessing their service. This is like saying that because I bought my browser, my favorite website must always be available for free.
There's generally no expectation of such from any service-based outfit that has a one-time fee. In general you are required to maintain membership within the organization to be able to continue use their service. Even GPL only requires you to distribute the code for three years after your release and not in perpuity.
- It costs nothing (though you can usually get Money/Quicken Free After Rebate)[
- It is cross-platform
- It will import QIFs
- It uses double-entry accounting (though this might take some time getting used to)
- No features expire
- All upgrades will also be free & occur more frequently than once a year if needed.
- Upgrades haven't broken import/export from old files from older versions
Diadvantages>>Any time you try to import a text transaction file (QFX),
>>the program calls home to see if the organization you downloaded from paid its "Quicken Tax".
I can't stress how true the previous poster's comment is. I lead a team of developers that just finished implementing QFX support for our company, a mid-sized financial institution. The contract terms that Intuit insisted on are truly outrageous. Sure enough, if the customer has a QFX file, but we aren't a "supported" organization, Quicken phones home and will refuse to import the file. This isn't a threat to Quicken users - it's a threat to the *banks*. The amount we had to pay to be "allowed" to continue providing the same support for our customers who had already been downloading QIF files for years was, uh, a LOT. They also strongly "encouraged" us to cripple or disable support for older versions.
During testing, we were not allowed to go live with our upgraded service until we passed their test suites. Problem is, their testing process was neither well-defined nor timely. They promised us a certain scheudle, and then reported "problems" during testing that weren't originally described. When these threatened to delay our production schedule, our customer rep slyly hinted that if we wanted to pay an additional fee, that they could "bump up" our testing in front of other companies. It was a *large* additional fee. It took some high level calls from our management, involving literal screaming, before they would agree to stick to the original schedule.
I am stunned, truly, that Intuit hasn't been held up for antitrust scrutiny at this point. They held financial companies with far more money than them over a barrel, in their latest round of "upgrades". Surely, I keep thinking, it won't be long until some of the big boys round up Intuit and take them out behind the woodshed for a good beating - legal, financial, literal, take your pick.
There is more to it than that. I used Quicken 2000, and the omly online features I used were downloading transactions - that's it. No Checkfree, no bill pay. Quicken stlii stopped working.
The basics of it are that Intuit has the banks by the balls. As I understand it, they changed formats, forced the banks to change formats, and then precluded the banks from supporting the old formats. Then they came up with some cock & bull story about "security upgrades".
That being said, Michael's last line is still bullshit.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Agree, mod parent's parent up. This is the REAL story that gets easily lost in slashdot noise.
Intuit can play both ends: they squeeze the customer with forced upgrades, and the banks with "compatibility" policies.
There is no technical reason why my Quicken 2000 stopped importing QFX files on 4/18/2004: the file format hasn't changed. In fact, I can STILL download QFX from my bank and rename the FID (financial instution id) and it works! Its also possible to edit "hosts" file to block the Intuit "phone home"
127.0.0.1 ofx-prod-brand.intuit.com,
127.0.0.1 ofx-prod-fiusage.intuit.com
127.0.0.1 ofx-prod-cuusage.intuit.com
What I dont understand is why banks agree to this?
If every bank would just allow download of OFX from their website, customers could take Intuit's
"branding" servers out of this loop, a place where Intuit never belonged in the first place.
I finally said "screw you Intuit" and have been happily importing OFX files into GnuCash for 6 months.
It's not so much that Quicken 2004 and earlier versions will stop working its that the current versions will stop working.
.QIF file import capability. Today, you can download your Coastal transactions from COLTS or the e-Statements site in a .QIF file and import that file into Quicken 2004 and earlier versions. In the future, Coastal will continue to make .QIF transaction downloads available via COLTS and e-Statements. These download files will continue to work with Quicken 2004 and earlier versions as they have in the past. At this point, we have no plans to discontinue this support.
If you choose to upgrade to or purchase Quicken 2005, you will lose the ability to import your Coastal transactions.
Coastal has chosen not to support the real-time .OFX interface required for Quicken 2005 as Intuit now charges each financial institution a yearly licensing, setup and maintenance fee to achieve the same functionality available in all previous versions of their software. However instead of assessing a fee based on the number of actual Quicken users here at Coastal, they require a fee based upon our asset size and TOTAL number of members.
As a not-for-profit organization, we are not willing to submit to such an unfair pricing structure.
We appreciate and value your business with Coastal and will notify you if this situation changes.
From my credit Union www.coastalfcu.org
Dear Users of Quicken,
Intuit has announced that its Quicken version 2005 will no longer support the