Intuit Abandoning Quicken

I've been reading this thread with interest, having been a Quicken user since DOS days. I sent a query to Walt Mossberg, the technology editor of the Wall Street Journal. You may, or may not, be interested in his Reply:

- - - I have no information to that effect, but the product's

- - - sales have been pretty stagnant for years. Turns out

- - - there's a real limit to the number of people interested

- - - in rich, detailed tracking of their finances. Intuit and

- - - others have for years been moving towards simpler

- - - web-based alternatives.

- - -

- - -

- - - Walt Mossberg

- - - Wall Street Journal

- - - walt.allthingsd.com

If this is the case, I find it confusing that almost every bank in the nation supports quickens and QB transactional downloads. Is QB also in danger of extinction?

Mikel

I only asked Mossberg about Quicken for home.

I don't think your estimate of "almost every bank in the nation" is correct. And I believe the number of fi's differs between Quicken, Quicken Online, QuickBooks, and Mint.

I - sadly - agree with Mossberg's evaluation: based on the hundreds of thousands of comments I have read about Quicken (and quite few about Money); I think that far too few people appreciate what products like Quicken can do.

We live in a generation that expects that they will never have to do more than make one mouse click, to know everything they have ever wanted to know.

And who think that every product should work *exactly* as they want it to work for them personally, or the manufacturer is: ignorant, incompetent, or uncaring.

A world of people brought up to believe that whatever they want is owed to them; who have no appreciation for what it takes to create useful products (and can virtually never produce anything like that product on their own); and whose education leaves them unwilling, or unable to understand how products are created (not just the techiques for creating the product; but the decisions about what is economically feasible to include in the product - something most "coders" have no concept of) ... are not likely to grasp the value of a product like Quicken.

There is a very strong market pressure to produce less expensive products ... everywhere ... in this country and in the rest of the world. Within reason; I think it's a good pressure: and no company can ignore it. Unfortunately, those alleged "customers" who believe that they "deserve" whatever they "want", are unable to make the distinction between what is feasible and what they desire (the dichotomy is possible because it's virtually *never* their money at stake, at least in their minds - to say nothing of a society that claims that folks deserve what they have never earned). They have already put Money out of business, and they are on their way to doing the same to Quicken.

[Anyone doubting should try reading the posts from Quicken Mac users in the Quicken Live Community. Despite the fact that Intuit told them that the existing Quicken for the Mac product was not able to pay its own way ... and that Intuit's research indicated that potential Quicken for the Mac users would not pay enough for a complete Quicken product, so Intuit is going to produce a much simpler, much less capable Quicken Mac product, suited to the users that Intuit's reseach indicates are legitimate potential Quicken for the Mac users ... the existing Q for Mac users continue to pretend that Intuit is doing them wrong. They could care less whether Intuit (and future Intuit product) goes out of business ... they just want someone to provide them with goodies that they have no reason to believe they deserve. Let someone else pay for it ... who that someone else is, they will refuse to acknowledge. I wonder where I've heard that before.]

I've glanced through your writings, John and I generally agree. But then even Socrates complained about "today's youth" in his time who were ungrateful, fresh, and unwilling to learn, according to him.

My opinion is that Quicken/Intuit made a very big mistake by not making the software or the download capabilities as a subscription. In my opinion something like Quicken should cost a fair amount of money to purchase, with a "service contract" for bug fixes and minor updates for x number of years. The service contract should be renewable after those x years for let's say 1/3 of the purchase price for the next version's bug fixes and minor updates. On top of that, for a yearly fee, should be the ability to download data. The ability to output the data and import an edited version should be somewhere included.

The Mint approach may be useful - I haven't looked at it in detail. For me, having my data totally under my control is essential. Redundancy of backups is a must. As of now, I have access via the web to the companies that I have outsourced control of my money to - banks, credit card companies, mortgages, investment. While a compilation in one place would be useful, including the manipulation via the web of those monies, that is only an incremental thing.

Now for someone to make a really useful version of Quicken, Moneydance, Gnucash, or whatever ... sigh ...

I've bought every Quicken version for the Macintosh since 1995. I'm not asking anyone else to pay for it. If Intuit had released three versions since the most recent version, Quicken 2007, they would have had three purchases from me. Since they have not, they don't have that money, and I'm not interested in buying a castrated version of Quicken (Quicken Essentials) for any price.

So Intuit is not doing me "wrong" since I'm happy with my 2007 version. If it stops working on some future version of the Mac OS or if the format of online payments accepted by my bank changes so that Quicken

2007 won't work, or if it's otherwise disabled, then I'll have to look at alternatives. Storing my financial data on an Intuit server is not one of those alternatives.

Paul

Take the example of OpenOffice as proof that a large-scale, robust application can be written in an environment that is not directly tied to any single operating system. There would be no need for a separate Quicken for Mac (or Linux or etc.) if they had not made the decision to lock into Windows-only. In fact, I am evaluating a new product called YNAB which is written using the Adobe AIR platform. Microsoft abandoned its financial user base. Intuit is threatening to do the same. If someone were to develop a module which covers the stock and mutual fund tracking capabilities of either product, I would be jumping off the status quo bandwagon altogether. It seems to have all the bells and whistles I would expect from a "windows" application, yet runs on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

I was a Quicken user back in the old DOS days. Sure, it was much simpler then, but how much of the conceptual model of tracking finances requires Windows-Only features? They ported to Windows because the "had to" stay current. Why is Mac or Linux less current than Windows? How hard is it to plug in a new UI? [Well, as a software developer, I understand that bad coding practices may not fully separate business logic from UI logic, which can cause portability issues. If bad design is the "reason" they can't port to Mac, going to a web-only model will have the same set of problems.]

-- Richard

I never want any of my data on the net, no matter what the promises for security are.

For traveling I am interested in the iPad but I do not see any way it could run Quicken.

One method would be an on-line Quicken program running in the Safari browser using data that stays on my iPad. That would be an app that I would gladly pay for. Transferring Quicken data from a PC to the iPad and back is not a problem.

Eric

Wouldn't running Quicken on any portable device be very risky? Laptops, netbooks, etc. are very commonly stolen.

One way to at least decrease the risk, if not completely eliminate it, would be to keep all the data on something like a thumb drive (which you keep separate from the laptop).

All data files that contain info you would rather not be easily available should be password protected.

I do realize that it is impossible to defend against a determined operator but why would someone like that find your files interesting compared to a company or government data file?

And perhaps delete your page file when finished.

Mikel

Perhaps 'almost every' is a bit optimistic, but I do live in a large city/metropolitan area, and, while a few of the small independents might not offer Q & QB downloads, most seem to. I do agree with most of your assertions below.

Also, my objections to the demise of Q might change if the definition of "a product that would let users readily switch between desktop and online modes" means that one can keep one's data exclusively on the desktop.

Mikel

Would there then be any reason to contemplate a demise of Quicken?

I, too, would have no concern about the demise of desktop Quicken as it now exists, it the change were merely to make desktop Quicken easily able to communicate with Mint.

But I'm not convinced that is the change being contemplated by Intuit ... or hoped for by those who desire one-click "financial knowledge".

I've been mulling this one over (using a thumb drive) for some time now, and would like to see further discussion.

There is a risk that so far has been overlooked, and that is a computer failure causing you to bring your machine in to a shop for repairs. If your personal data is on the machine, the repair shop has access to it. But not if you religiously keep personal data on a thumb drive.

However, thumb drives may also fail, and if so you would have a heck of a time recovering your data. So thought needs to be given to backing up the thumb drive.

I'm not in favor of encryption, especially a one-way encryption like PGP, because it is too easy to lose your secret key. A hard drive failure, for example.

We must assume that the machinery will fail and/or the media will become obsolete and unreadable, so recovery needs to take this into account.

"Keith Snyder" wrote in news:CHdbn.399$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe09.iad:

Backups are your friends ...

As is repairing your own system, if able. No one touches my machines but me.

Mikel

A currently available travel solution is to use a VPN App on the iPad (they already exist for iPod/iPhone so should run) and connect to your desktop. Would then have to implement Wake-On-LAN on the desktop to wake it up.

Of course this does not answer the question if Q is abandoned so is OT.

I deleted my page file about four years ago, and I've never missed it. I bought an extra gig of RAM, and turned off the page file in Windows. It was an instant, noticeable performance boost. Now that apps have gotten bigger, I'm going to buy another two gig of RAM, but I'll never turn paging back on. Disk speed can't compare with RAM speed, and the overhead of running a paging file is huge.

As far as using a USB thumb drive, keep in mind that they have no memory error checking or correction, so they can suffer from undetected data failures. Real disk drives have error detection and correction built in to insure data reliability. USB thumb drives are also vulnerable to loss or damage. They work well as an easy transport vehicle for data, but they need to be backed up to a more secure and reliable medium.

-- Jim