Planned Oblivion

The greedy ratfinks at Intuit are retiring Quicken 2004. They slapped me in the face with this revelation, not by telling me about it via e-mail, even though they could have. I found out when I tried to download my financial information into another wondrous, magical Intuit product, Turbo Tax.

Then last week, I attempted to download cleared charges from my bank and got a dire pop-up warning from Intuit. A death-knell for my current version of Quicken. On the 30th of April Intuit will no longer support Quicken 2004. By “no longer support” they mean that I will be unable to download cleared charges from my bank. “No longer supporting” software used to mean that users wouldn’t be able to phone a call center in Bangalore and talk to someone named “David” or “Cindy,” who was obviously not American because he or she would be polite. No offence to “David” and “Cindy,” but I could have lived with customer service silence.

Now it means that Intuit will cut off the financial information download function of software I legally purchased from them a mere three years ago like a gangrenous limb. Only the limb isn’t gangrenous. The limb is working just fine thank you very much. Without the limb, I’ll have to get off my lazy butt and enter receipts—oh so many receipts. Intuit would have been better off taking a more honest route and making the cut-off date April Fool’s day. I think they call this kind of money-grubbing “planned obsolescence.”

I’m resistant to spending $50 or more on a new and improved version of Quicken, not only because I feel they have me by the slide rule, but also because I have upgraded before. Each subsequent “improvement” of Quicken has taken more space on my hard drive, tripled the number of absolutely useless features, and contained 33% more nagging to purchase other Intuit products and services.

It would stand to reason that fiscal concerns have prompted mutilation of the toddler Quicken 2004. (He never even made it into Kindergarten.) But it seems that picking the pockets of loyal customers is no way to win friends and influence people. Profits for the Intuit are down 20% this last quarter. Despite the fact that it’s tax season and they have a justifiably annual taxing product. What with the rising cost of services at H&R Block, Intuit must really be falling down on the job.

If you have any doubts that the “deciders” at Intuit are completely out of touch with anything resembling reality, I urge you to visit Intuit Tax Rap, a place where Vanilla Ice (obviously using software instead of a CPA or an agent) invites people to submit a tax rap. (It's so stupid, it hurts. Just like Fox News.) They neglect to mention whether the measly grand prize is $25,000 before or after taxes. But it’s probably wise of them to save their money for the class-action suit.

The sad part is that the other big choices for financial and tax software is Microsoft Money and TaxCut. I need another piece of Microsoft software like I need another scary blue screen error. And according to a customer review, versions of Microsoft Money only let users download for 2 years. So it seems I can blame Bill Gates propagating for yet another software swindle. It’s a good thing that Amazon sells used versions of Quicken.