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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?
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.
>>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.
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.