Intuit FTL

[unixronin]

No, that's not as in "faster than light".  That's as in gamer-speak "For The Lose".  Intuit has just announced that effective April 30, they're not only terminating technical support for Quicken 2005 which in itself is fair enough), but they're disabling online services that are (a) working perfectly well and (b) between you and your bank anyway.  And they're not making any real effort to hide the fact that their motivation in doing this is to force remaining Quicken 2005 users to upgrade.

"Nice financial management process you've built up for yourself here.  Be a shame if anything were to happen to it.  Know what I mean?"

Project to complete by April 30:  Migrate to GnuCash, or Moneydance, or ... well, anything but Quicken, really.  If my software is still working, the vendor should let me continue using it as long as it continues to work, not intentionally break it to force me to give them money.

Update:

mrmeval linked here, and noted GnuCash and MoneyDance as alternatives.  So I thought I'd comment that I've actually been evaluating MoneyDance for some time.  I actually need to go see if there's an update to the version I downloaded, but in playing with it so far, I've found it to work very well.  There are just two issues I've discovered to date that I consider to be strikes against it:

• The register has no bottom "fiill-in-the-blanks" empty line for new transactions.  Every time you want to add a transaction, there is a distinct menu-bar action required.  This is annoying because it's an unnecessary extra step on every transaction that adds nothing functionally.  In essence, MoneyDance is failing to follow the register metaphor in this instance.  (If you're used to finance programs that use such a bottom blank transaction for transaction entry, you may also find yourself futinely attempting to scroll down further to get to the bottom of your register when in fact you're already there.)
• Somewhat more seriously, MoneyDance uses a double-entry accounting model, but MoneyDance's double-entry model is implemented in a way that makes it impossible¹ to recategorize a transaction after it's already been entered.  This could be a problem if, for example, you accidentally mis-categorize a transaction, or discover after the fact that a certain class of transaction is in fact tax-related (or has just become tax-related due to changes in tax law).

[1]  This is directly per MoneyDance tech support.  I asked them how to recategorize a transaction that had already been entered, and they told me, "You can't."

Comments

[glitch25.livejournal.com]

Not to burst the bubble, but they've been doing this all along. They got me to upgrade to Quicken 2004 as a result back in the day.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

That doesn't excuse it.


In more detail:

As I was standing (well, sort of leaning) at the kitchen bar making coffee, I was thinking that the question to ask Intuit is, "Are you aware of currently exploitable code in Quicken 2005 at this time?" And honestly, there's no right answers to the question. Because if the answer is "Yes", then the next question is "Then why didn't you warn me?" And if the answer is "No", then the next question is "Then why are you forcing me to upgrade instead of merely terminating support?"

Thing is, downloading financial data is a direct OFX connection between Quicken and the bank. It *does not go through Intuit* and doesn't require any support from them. In fact, if the transaction WERE for some reason being routed via Intuit's network, the next big nasty question for Intuit would be, "Why are you unnecessarily routing my confidential financial data through your network without my knowledge or permission?"

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

And the afterthought to that: Yes, they've done forced upgrades before. But when they first started doing forced upgrades, it was a lot longer than three years to EOL. How much longer will it be before they think they can get away with forcing their customers to upgrade every year?

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

Blogged this with credit and I'm starting a new thing where I'll turn comments off but point them to comment in the originators post with a link.

http://mrmeval.livejournal.com/765392.html

[argonel.livejournal.com]

Around 2004 the messed around with their tax software enough that I switched to Tax cut uninstalled my pirate copy of quicken and shudder bought a copy of MS money. I haven't given them any money since then.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I switched to using TaxCut long ago, back before HR Block bought Parsons Technology. I've heard MS Money is very good, and I'm actually debating giving it a try.

[argonel.livejournal.com]

I feel vaugely dirty for even suggesting it, but it has worked pretty well for me. I have noticed that it sometimes leave a runaway process after closing on XP (at least on Money 2003) but it is pretty easy to track down in the process list and manually kill. For what I use it for the quirks are tolerable.

[arasirsul.livejournal.com]

After the stunt those monkeys pulled with Turbotax 2002 (http://discuss.extremetech.com/forums/45/249832305/ShowThread.aspx) by scribbling in your boot sector in the name of copy protection, I'm kinda of the opinion that five years later, folks who're using their software kinda deserve what they got.

On the other hand, it just goes to show: People don't care what their software companies are doing to them, even when it involves bending them over and asking them to grab their ankles-- as evidenced by the fact that these jokers are still in business.

[skellington.livejournal.com]

I stopped upgrading at 2004. That's the last one that could do things to portable formats.

I try to manually enter everything, so the downloading part doesn't bug me, EXCEPT I'd really like to be able to download stock quotes. Worse, when I re-installed 2004 after a hard disk death, it DID download stock quotes until it downloaded the latest patch. The PATCH(!) disabled further online access.

I may do TurboTax, but I'm switching our accounts to MoneyDance momentarily, I think. I too need to play some more.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Worse, when I re-installed 2004 after a hard disk death, it DID download stock quotes until it downloaded the latest patch. The PATCH(!) disabled further online access.

Yeah, I've wondered whether just firewalling off quicken.com would prevent disabling online access.


BTW, I've always found TaxCut to be much better than TurboTax. I will not touch TurboTax with a ten-foot pole.

[unix-jedi.livejournal.com]

Oh, Meeeeeeeemooorrrriiiieeeeeessssss...

Ask Ed Foster (http://www.gripe2ed.com/). When he was writing for Infoworld, (as that publication was nosediving down), Inuit ran away year after year with his "Worst Service" company award. (Updates would - intentionally - break the system, only "fixable via upgrade". I recall it kept wiping out tax tables if you weren't subscribed with Quicken, and were using it for payroll.. You *could* enter it all manually - until you got whatever update, and it would wipe it out, and there was no way to save it... Just... subscribe, and all the pain will go away!

I think he wrote something once, when they got edged out for the top spot, and he was surprised.

I'm surprised they were letting you run that old of software - they're getting lax in their old age. :)

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

I have been running gnucash for the past year. I don't do the bank download thing, so I can't comment on how that works, but the two gripes are not an issue with gnucash. It does what I need, but custom reports are a royal pain to deal with. I still use TurboTax for my tax return.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I've actually been planning to switch over to gnucash for some time. The only reason I haven't done it is because manually building the dependency tree on a Slackware 7-based custom distro with no package management turned out to be a complete nightmare, and I haven't gotten around to resuming my planned-but-interrupted migration of babylon5 to Gentoo.

(I had my first Gentoo install 90%-95% there, then the disk it was on died. I wish I could encapsulate the existing installation under some kind of virtualization so that I could run my current 2.4 kernel and a Gentoo install with a new 2.6 kernel side by side.)

[tabbifli.livejournal.com]

I'm EOLing my usage of Quicken as soon as the old house sells. The new household uses GnuCash. It's easy enough to use, it just takes a little bit of time to get used to the differences, and it's a bit of a pain to acclimate to the difference between single-entry and double-entry. However, that's a pretty quickly disappearing pain.

You *can* recategorize a transaction in Gnucash. It'll just ask you if you really want to. :)And I think you can download some things (I'm not positive) in a pull, rather than push, manner.