I must admit, that is a nice little rakcet they have, turning off features if one does not upgrade to the latest product. In the 10+ years I have used Quicken, I've not seen this before.
If it is legal then why does MS not do the same thing? Put a message out saying unless you upgrade to Vista, you will not be able to access the internet, for example.
From: "geoff"
| I must admit, that is a nice little rakcet they have, turning off features | if one does not upgrade to the latest product. In the 10+ years I have used | Quicken, I've not seen this before. | | If it is legal then why does MS not do the same thing? Put a message out | saying unless you upgrade to Vista, you will not be able to access the | internet, for example. | | --g |
They do.
WinNT4.0 is dead and you can't get updates. Win95 is dead and you can't get updates.
I am not sure about Win98 and WinME.
Microsoft has a very similar sunset policy for Money.
MS *DOES* do the same thing. They do it with Money and they do it with their other software. There are no more updates/patches/fixes or support for any OS earlier than Windows 2000 and only critical ons for that.. You won't be able to buy XP after June 30, 2008. SQL 2000 (and SQL 7) are unsupported....
. . . but Quicken is not talking about 'no updates', features are being turned off. Specifically, their notice says the following functionality will be turned off:
- Downloading of financial data from the bank.
- Online bill pay.
- Downloading stock quotes.
- Uploading of portfolio info.
- Investment features.
. . . all of the above turned off, gone. Their reason for doing this is they are managing their support costs by not supporting releases more than three versions old.
If they do not want to support a version, no more updates, etc., that is one thing but to turn off features to force users to upgrade is a different game all together, seems to me.
If MS said unless you upgrade your OS to the next version the following will happen:
- No internet access.
- Reading but no writing of files to HDDs.
- Monitors will only work at 640x480 resolution.
. . . there would be a major backlash.
Regarding Money, its all in the fine print.
"For Microsoft Money Plus, online services available for two (2) years after activation, or Jan. 31, 2011, whichever is earlier. Online services, subject to limited availability, include but are not limited to the abilities to (i) download your financial institution?s statements and obtain stock quotes; and (ii) synchronize your client-based data with MSN Money. Certain online services and options may only be obtained separately from your financial institution(s), with or without a fee, so please contact your financial institution for details. Microsoft reserves the right to modify or discontinue these online services at any time."
Please note the last statement.
Oilcan
Too bad this section of the market does not have competition . . .
They're not turning the features off. The stuff that runs on your machine still runs. They are turning off the remote services that run on (or through) their machines.
. . . yes but all they are doing on their end is saying, 'oh, this request came from Q2005, sorry, no service'.
Also, when I communicate with my bank, is it my bank that Q2005 is talking to or Intuit? When I download transactions from my stock broker's company, is it Intuit who downloads it or is it being downloaded from the brokerage firm?
There is, sort of. If you Google around you'll find several alternatives but none of them work very well for me.
Take a look at Moneydance:
and some of the others.
Why should Quicken get _MY_ financial information from their server?
My expectation has always been that I was communicating directly from my computer to my financial institutions. My account information and passwords are of concern to me and my broker/bank, and are of no business of Intuit or anyone else. If this information is actually being sent to Intuit, I would consider it a major security breach, and a good reason never to use Quicken. Of course, if this is so, they now have several years of my financial information.
I ran a network sniffer to see exactly which IP addresses were used during a Quicken update. It seems that Quicken is communicating directly with the financial institution. I did not see any messages sent to Intuit, but I need to do a more comprehensive search.
If Quicken does not use the Intuit servers to download financial information, then there is no reason for disabling this feature, especially if the financial institution has to pay Intuit for the privilige.
Charles
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