I’m upset with Intuit and I’m not sure what to do about it.
First and foremost, let me get this out of the way. I love Quicken on the Macintosh. I’ve used Quicken since at least 1995 (those are the oldest entries in my register in Quicken today, but I think I’ve used it longer than that) and I have over 6000 entries. That’s 15 years of use and loyalty to a piece of software. You don’t often find that. In fact, I’m pretty sure the only other piece of software I’ve been using as long on my Macintosh is BBEdit (I was a beta-tester for BBEdit back in the day). So, clearly, I find value in the software, enjoy the software, and have been a loyal user of the software for many years. But something changed 4 years ago.
In November 2006, Intuit released an update to their Quicken software for the Mac, Quicken 2007 for Mac. This was a yearly update to the prior product Quicken – for Mac 2006, which had been released the prior year in August 2005. Things were looking up, we seemed to slowly be gaining ground back with Inuit and getting more regular updates. It didn’t bother Macintosh users too much that the Macintosh version and the Windows version were divergent. The development effort at Inuit was clearly on the Windows side and the feature lists of the two products showed it. The Windows version was just more feature complete and capabilities had slowly eroded away from the Macintosh version of the software. I can even remember back to Quicken Deluxe 2000 for Mac. We don’t garner the “Deluxe” branding anymore, it’s now just the “Essentials” (more later). Erosion of features was also true for Quicken 2007 for Mac, but we got by.
Then silence. Intuit discussed Quicken 2008 for Mac, in order to support Leopard. Leopard was going to be such a dramatic change from the previous Panther release of Mac OSX, that they should just wait for it to hit the streets before releasing an update. Then in January 2008, Intuit announced Quicken Financial Life for Mac. So after just a bit more than a year from the release of Quicken 2007, Intuit was keeping their commitment to the Macintosh platform and performing an update, which was “slated for a fall 2008 release”. Then the fall came and went, but we kept hearing about Quicken Financial Life for Mac. Finally, we got to see it when MacWorld did a Preview: Quicken Financial Life for Mac in February 2009 and noted that it “remains a work in progress at this early stage”. A “work in progress”? A full year after it was announced?
That’s when I got involved. I was upset, because Intuit kept sending me upgrade offers for QuickBooks, so I Tweeted this in March 2009:
@QuickBooks @intuit @QuickenPRChels. Stop sending me upgrade offers. I won’t upgrade until you support the Mac properly again. #Quicken
-Rob
That brings us to today readers. For on January 10th, 2010, I got my email!
“It’s Official: New Quicken Mac! Upgrade & Save $10”
Woo hoo! New Quicken for Mac! Hold on though, here’s the email:
Um, that says, “Quicken Essentials for Mac”. What happened to “Financial Life”? This doesn’t bode well for Macintosh users, as not only have we moved down the food chain from “Deluxe”, but now we’re only getting the “Essentials”?
It gets worse. If you go to the Pre-Order page and read up on Using a Prior Version of Quicken Mac you’ll find the following page:
Let’s take a look at each of those bullet points.
Can I track my investments? No. Use our four year-old product Quicken 2007 if you want to do this.
Can I export my data to TurboTax? No. Use our four year-old product Quicken 2007 if you want to do this.
Can I pay my bills within Quicken? No. Use our four year-old product Quicken 2007 if you want to do this.
Can I transfer my data from an older version of Quicken Mac? Yes. Whew! Thank goodness!
Can I convert my Quicken Windows data to Quicken Essentials for Mac? Yes. (But why would you?)
WTF?
So I guess “Essentials” no longer includes things like using other Intuit products with it, paying bills, or tracking investments? In fact, “Essentials” now seems to be equivalent to just setting up a big spreadsheet, as the bulk of the functionality has been eliminated.
Now the crux of my issue. Should I upgrade? Should *you* upgrade?
Intuit has put us in a very precarious position. I’m a firm believer that you should “vote with your wallet”. My vote currently would be to completely skip this abomination of a software product. However, taking that stance has two major drawbacks:
- By not purchasing the product, Intuit flops with this product, it justifies their belief that the Apple Macintosh isn’t a viable platform for them, and they completely abandon the product. Bad.
- The current Quicken 2007 for Mac is a PowerPC application. Yes, it’s NOT Intel native. Really bad.
Yep, if you haven’t been paying attention, Quicken 2007 is probably the only application you’re running that is a PowerPC application. In fact, if you’ve loaded up Snow Leopard, you’ll find out you now have to load Rosetta manually, in order to run Quicken, as PowerPC support is no longer a part of the base OSX. What a complete pain! Here is part of my Activity Monitor:
So, actually paying for this upgrade (more on that in a moment) has two distinct advantages:
- You finally get to run Quicken as an Intel native application, and can probably uninstall Rosetta.
- You send a signal to Intuit that we Macintosh users are a tough lot, and we demand software, even if it sucks!
But Point #2 above is sending the wrong message in my opinion. Yes, we want Quicken on our Macs, but we don’t want THIS Quicken. We want a feature-compatible version of Quicken to the one running on Windows. Why is that so hard?
So, should I upgrade? Do I upgrade and help Intuit recoup their investment in rewriting the software in the hopes that they will continue to support the Mac platform, even though I hate this product offering? Or do I skip this version and “vote with my wallet”, in the hopes they will flop and then give us what we want, but risk having them flop and abandon us entirely?
Oh yea, the cost of the upgrade. Well, if you Pre-Order it you get to save $10! That means it only COSTS THE SAME AS THE WINDOWS FEATURE-RICH VERSION!
Yes, you read that right. The retail price of the Macintosh version of Quicken Essentials 2010 is $10 MORE than Quicken 2010 for Windows.
I think I just made up my mind. iBank anyone?
{ 28 comments }
We need to email Intuit that not only are we NOT going to buy the upgrade but now that we can’t download data into TurboTax that we can now move to cheaper, better money managers and TAX programs.
Can you make the font larger, or brighter? Grey on black is very hard to read at this size.
Thanks.
I’m with you Rob. Using QFW 2007 running on a virtual machine on my Mac. It’s the only reason I have Windows. I, too, have 12 years or so of data on Quicken & manager my investments from there.
I think the only clear choice is for Mac users not to buy this product. Given its sad feature comparison with the Windows version, I think Intuit has already spoken loud & clear about their intentions for the platform. The most frustrating thing is that they keep giving it lip service & trying to convince their customers that they’ll like it despite its dearth of features.
Rob,
Please send your great article in it’s entirety to your contacts at Quicken, and ask them in all sincerity, to put themselves in your position, and ask themselves seriously, what would they do? I switched to Mac 2 years ago or so and am currently running fusion for QW2010 which is a PITA to have to do. This whole experience with this Beta has been totally surreal. While I don’t doubt the sincerity of the developers on the Quicken Mac forums, who at least put themselves out there, the management position on this has been totally unforgivable in my mind. Thank you for writing such a great article.
Yes, please also review Mac financial alternatives to Quicken. I would welcome the reviews from somebody with your experience and perspective, not only with Apple, but with this sort of software.
Phil.
From Quicken Inner Circle Forum:
Rob,
EXCELLENT SUMMARY! WELL DONE. I am passing your link along to every Macintosh user and Macintosh club I am connected to on the West Coast. I know of no other way to get Intuit’s attention other than to keep revealing the TRUTH.
Mac
From Quicken Inner Circle Forum:
Rob,
Excellant post. I too will be posting and tweeting your article to everybody I can as well.
From Quicken Inner Circle Forum:
That is a good summary, Rob.
Intuit is asking too much. The "just stick with us and we’ll eventually get it right…" approach doesn’t do it for me. I, too, have looked at the alternatives, but each of them is lacking in various ways. I’m currently using Q2005 and it gets the job done better than any current alternative – especially in the area of reporting. I just realize that the clock is ticking on running legacy PowerPC apps in Rosetta, so I’ll have to leave eventually.
I also don’t buy the, "writing complex software is hard.." line either. Intuit dropped the ball on multiple occasions and they never put serious resources behind this development. I’m sure it’s not really personal on their part, it’s just business – go where the market share is. Look at TurboTax, for example: it’s got great cross-platform deployment and feature parity between the Mac and Windows versions. Why couldn’t that be accomplished on the Mac? Perhaps the Quicken and TurboTax teams should get together to discuss ideas on cross-platform development.
I’ve also read in these forums that Intuit felt like they got caught cold by many of the under-the-hood changes in Leopard/Snow Leopard and had to wrestle with Core Data more than they expected. Pfooey! To me it looks like they just gave up on the Mac years ago and never bothered to keep a stable of Mac developers who stayed current with technology, so now they’re playing catch up. For premier ADC customers, Apple does a great job of coaching developers along, including providing pre-release versions of OS updates and direct access to SW engineering staff. Wolfram managed to port Mathematica over to Intel-based Macs in about two weeks and demo it at a Macworld rollout. I’m going out on a limb here and opine that Mathematica is a wee bit more complex than Quicken. Sorry to any Intuit apologists out there, but I’m not feelin’ the love. My unreasonable wish would be for Apple to develop their own financial app and add it to iWork. Probably won’t happen; but I can dream.
After all that ranting, I’d still buy a *decent* Quicken for Mac product from Intuit, and I may yet be surprised by what gets delivered this month, but for now it’s looking like I’ll pass on QE2010FM. It’s a shame, really, because I want to like this product; just can’t.
Intuit should send out an update to all Quicken users suspending the three year shutdown of existing product until three months after acceptable versions of both Mac Quicken and Windows Quicken are in unlimited supply at all normal retail sources. This includes suspending the three year death knell for users of Quicken 2007, 08 etc for Windows until the Mac version is available, since there are a bunch of customers switching from Windows to Mac who are waiting for a full featured Quicken to do so.
I suggest we all stop using the word "upgrade" when referring to new versions of software products. If I’m feeling generous, I call them "updates"; if not, just "yearly releases" or "new releases/versions". IMHO, by automatically thinking of them as "upgrades", we have already fallen into their trap: expect something "new and improved" every year; buy it unless there’s a strong reason not to, and get angry if the new version doesn’t do what we want, or if they skip a year. My default is to *not* buy new versions unless they have a feature I really want, or the old version doesn’t work on my new computer.
For the record, I’m a 15-or-so-year user of Quicken for Mac; I’m currently using Quicken 2006; it does everything I want, and I will use it until I can’t. At that point I will figure out what to do next.
I have spent some time trying out other products, and the only one (so far) that can import 99% or so of my Qucken data without any trouble is Moneydance.
The obvious (though unasked) question is this:
Is there a way to communicate to Intuit that:
1. The Apple Macintosh can be a viable platform for them, and
2. The reason they’re not succeeding is the poor quality of their products?
My answer is yes. Here’s how: Order the upgrade. Try out the new product. If it doesn’t meet your needs, return it and ask for a refund. And make sure you include an explanation of how the product fails to meet your needs.
Imagine if some non-trivial percentage of Mac customers—say 5%—returned the product. That would send a strong message, would it not?
I had used quicken for over 10 years. The news that the "new" quicken would have less features than the 2007 version was too much. I switched to iBank and won’t be looking back. I’d rather support a company that actually puts resources into their mac products.
Check out MoneyWell too. It’s a great Mac app. Clean UI, very intuitive, great for budgeting. An iPhone version is coming when version 1.5 gets out of beta. Investment tracking is planned for version 2 (according to the developer).
http://www.nothirst.com
Very informative summary. Thank you.
I too have been looking forward to this long awaited update. I’m running Quicken 2009 on XP via VMWware. It’s the ONLY reason I even need VMWare!!! And yes, I just want the Mac version to run with the same or similar features as Q2009…no more, no less. Sadly, Q2010 for Mac sounds like A LOT LESS and my 11 years of data probably won’t import. Nice!
However, my data does import into iBank, and MoneyDance. Unfortunately, it’s time to start testing alternatives.
Hi Rob (and Rob’s readers),
I’m the current product manager on Quicken Mac (as well as Quicken Windows). First off, I’d like to thank you for using the Quicken product for all these years, and also for taking the time to write up this feedback. As I hope my response here helps demonstrate, the Quicken team does spend quite a bit of time looking at feedback from a lot of different sources, including blogs.
I am a strong believer that being transparent with your users and customers can only result in a better outcome for everyone. To that end, I’d like to answer some of the questions that were posed in this post, to the best of my ability.
1) How can we make Intuit understand that we want feature-parity between the Quicken Mac and Quicken Windows products?
Believe me, we have been hearing this feedback from users. However, "feature parity" means different things to different people. In fact, on the Quicken Windows side, we often hear the opposite feedback: "Quicken has way too many features, and is too confusing to use". We’re always trying to strike a balance between providing new features that are useful and make it easier to manage your financial life, vs bloating the product to the point where it is unusable – after all, there is a reason people have been switching to Mac, right? Obviously, this threshold is different for different people. So, the more specific the feedback you can provide on what tasks you would like to achieve using Quicken, the more likely it is that we will be able to incorporate those suggestions.
2) What was Intuit thinking when they came up with the idea for Quicken Essentials for Mac?
First off, let me again reassure you that the Quicken team understands that the new product does not satisfy the needs of some of our existing users. In particular, we know that investment transaction tracking, direct bill pay, and export to TurboTax are important, and they are already being actively looked at for potential inclusion in future Quicken Mac products (I cannot, however, comment publicly on what is or is not going to be in future products).
Quicken Essentials for Mac is designed to be drop-dead easy to use for the main personal finance tasks that the majority of users do. You can easily see and analyze where your money is going, review transactions across all your different accounts, set reminders to pay bills, and create budgets to watch your spending. It connects to more banks (over 12 thousand) than any previous Quicken product, including Windows (around 4000). As you mentioned above, it runs natively on OS 10.5 and 10.6, and looks it. Obviously, none of this stuff helps you if you consider investment transactions tracking to be a must-have in your personal finance app, but we have tried to be transparent about the lack of this feature so you can make an informed purchase decision.
As a closing note, please rest assured that the Quicken team (both engineering and management) is listening to all the feedback we have been getting, and it impacts both the day-to-day decisions we make as well as our overall strategy, and we will release any information we have on future development and products as soon as we can. In the meantime, I would ask anyone in a relatively simpler financial situation to check out Quicken Essentials for Mac when it launches this month and see if it works for you, and give us feedback if it does not. Intuit offers a full 60-day money back guarantee if you are not satisfied.
Thanks,
Eddy
I’m a MS Money user – have been since 1995. Frankly, as much as I dislike Microsoft, I think Money was a terrific product. I"m sad to see them walk away from it. Since I converted to Mac in 2009, I’ve been running Money under Parallels and will probably continue to do so until it no longer functions as an online interface to financial institutions (12/31/2010). So I have a year to figure out what to do.
I need a product that is a single dashboard to all my financial accounts at many financial institutions. I also need to be able to pay bills through one of my existing banks through this dashboard. Mint doesn’t do bill pay. Looks like Quicken Essentials for Mac won’t either. This is pretty basic functionality. iBank doesn’t do it. Yodlee is trying (just added bill pay), but they have all kinds of account linkage problems with Charles Schwab. I bought and tried Quicken 2007 for the Mac and OMG – what a terrible product.
I agree with the comments above that Quicken should have the same facilities in Windows and Mac. I’ll also say that without bill pay, or the ability to track individual security buy/sells, it doesn’t work for me.
So, just one last thing – a question for all you Quicken old timers: Would you recommend I just move to Quicken Windows running under Parallels?
Thanks.
David
No one has mentioned Moneydance <http://moneydance.com>, a Java-based program that works pretty nicely under OS X. It’s not the prettiest app out there, but it is full-featured, it’s stable and reliable, its performance is pretty good for Java, and most importantly it has freed me from the tyranny of Intuit’s forced Quicken upgrades. Moneydance handles investment tracking as well as handling automatic downloading of transactions from a pretty wide selection of financial institutions. It’s worth checking out if iBank or MoneyWell doesn’t have the features you’re looking for.
I (almost) take Quicken Eddie at face value–that is, he does work for Intuit. However, neither he nor the message he posts here have yet appeared on Quicken’s Inner Circle (Mac) site. I don’t know what to make of that.<p>
That said, his message rings true, given what we know of both Intuit’s process to date, and of the grossly inadequate Quicken Essentials.
Did you try Budgetler? I’m strongly considering it as an option. It’s not that powerful as Quicken though, no investment, retirement plans, etc, but have all the basics, and I liked the interface much better iBank or Cha-Ching, and it’s online.
Oh god, I’m stressed. I’ve been using Quicken for Windows since 2000 and this year my husband bought me an iMac (which I’ve been loving). So here I am, waiting for Intuit to release Quicken Essentials already but the reviews haven’t given me confidence. I agree with the posts above and truly hope that Quicken for Mac will be allow me to (one day – SOON hopefully!) do everything I’d already been doing for the last decade with Quicken Windows. In the meantime, I’m checking out Moneydance and iBank. Moneydance is looking good for its multiple currency support and easy data imports. Thanks for the discussion on this, Rob and others.
I too have used Quicken for the Mac for a long time (since before 1992) and am currently using Quicken 2007. It does what I need it to do and I’ve used it so long I’m used to all it’s quirks and know how to work around it’s limitations. I don’t require that Intuit constantly update and improve their product and the fact that they don’t doesn’t make me feel ignored or insulted. I don’t really care if Quicken for the Mac doesn’t have the same feature set as Quicken for Windows. If I wanted to run Quicken for Windows under virtualization I could – I do run other Windows only programs with no problems – but I don’t feel the need.
Do I care that Quicken 2007 is a PowerPC application that runs under Rosetta? No, it is transparent to me.
Would it be nice to have a new full featured version of Quicken for the Mac? Yes, I like shinny, new software but I don’t need it.
Will I buy Quicken Essentials? No, I monitor my investments in Quicken.
My only real concern is that sometime in the future Quicken will cease to run on my Mac and I’ll be forced to look for an alternative. None of the other programs I’ve looked at for the Mac do what I need them to do so I don’t have a current solution except virtualization. I’m not real optimistic on this last poit.
I have been following the Intuit Quicken for MAC saga for a few years ever since I switched to the MAC. I still have an old PC that I keep just to run Quicken for Windows, now at V 2010. I have used it forever and they have almost always pleased me with it. However, as a Company, they are miserable at reading the public. There was the try to copy protect Quicken with some really dumb method. Then there was the TurboTax fiasco where they tried to charge for a federal eFile and would not let you print a return to file by mail. Now, the hilarious adventure of Quicken Financial Life or whatever it is now called. I cannot believe it took 3 years to come up with the yet to be released MAC update. It has been stripped of many of the features available on the old MAC version and totally pales in comparison to its Windows cousin. There are several MAC financial programs out there that are pretty decent, but not as good as Quicken for Windows. They are better than Quicken for the MAC or whatever….. Give me a break Intiut! Where is the beef? Where is the program? Why no free trial like almost every other piece of MAC software. Sure you have a 60 day return policy…. Hoping many people will not partake of your generosity…. I say stuff it Intuit, I am not going to pay $59 for a half baked product.
Rob, thanks for your assessment of Intuit’s neglect. I’ve been using Quicken for Mac since 1998, currently on version 2007. The Essentials description looks very much as though Intuit is targeting a lower level of user who has fewer needs for money management and fewer intellectual faculties for understanding them.
I believe you left out one truly annoying factor about Quicken I’ve discovered through several upgrades. Two or three releases after a particular version, Intuit effectively disables bank and credit transaction downloads in that version. I had to buy Q2007 after Q2004 informed me of this, for example. Further, I found no added convenience from "Web Connect’s" clumsy modal window that I hadn’t already been happy with using simple .qif files.
I have never paid bills through Quicken, simply because I never trusted the software’s clunky online setup procedures to perform transactions. I pay bills online through my bank’s site, which is convenient and functional. I’ll need any replacement for Quicken to import/track/reconcile bank, credit, loans, investments, and reports to the same level of detail that Q2007 does. Ideally, its interface will not impose someone’s new, simplistic metaphor on a scheme I’ve come to think of as a logical, if cluttered, electronic extension of paper bookkeeping.
I just wish Steve Jobs (Apple) would buy Intuit, or at least their Quicken for Mac division! Intuit can then place their emphasis directly on Quicken for Windows and TurboTax, while Apple rebrands Quicken for Mac to something catchy like Money for Mac (hey MS doesn’t have the Money software anymore)!!! I’m sure Apple and Intuit can work together to allow Money for Mac to work seamlessly with TurboTax! Intuit will never get this right, so the programmers at Apple have a golden opportunity to create something that is desperately needed by us Mac users! iWorks would be a good program to add Money for Mac to…heck…I’d pay $69.99 for a standalone Money for Mac or $99.99 for the whole iWorks program! Apple – I’m begging you please contact Intuit about buying out Intuit’s Mac division! Intuit – Please contact Apple to see if they are interested in acquiring your troubled Mac division! It’s a win-win situation!
My data in Quicken goes back to 1987. I Love Quicken and use it daily. But my copy of Quicken 2007 R3 for Mac is so unstable that I have to go back to a backup about once a month. I’m running on OSX 10.6.2 on a quad-core Xeon Mac pro. I have dozens of investments I track, with monthly changes due to dividends, purchases and sales, and I have to import all of that to Turbotax, so Quicken Essentials 2010 is a no-fly for me. It won’t do what I need, so I won’t buy it. We all know that sooner or later Apple will abandon Rosetta, so I have to start planning for what I’m going to do then. If there was a replacement for Quicken that I could import my Quicken data into, I’d buy it today. Anyone have any suggestions? Don’t talk to me about Mint, either. If I can’t trust Intuit to make a product that works, can I trust them to safeguard my financial data online? Get Real, Intuit! If I can’t depend on Quicken, I’ll be using something else, and switching from Turbotax and Quickbooks, as well. Would I buy Quicken for Windows, then buy windows to run it on and VMWare to run windows? Why should I? Intuit used to have a great product. they still do for windows. It’s just us third-class citizen Mac users who are out of luck!
I’ve been looking at alternatives to Quicken Essentials. We all know Apple will pull the plug on Rosetta sooner or later. I think buying VMware so I can buy Windows so I can buy Quicken for Windows is really overkill, so I looked at Crossover Mac, which allows Windows programs to be run natively on the Mac. Problems there. It says it supports Quicken for Windows 2009, so it will probably support Quicken for Windows 2010. But with OS X 10.6, it will only run in 32-bit mode. There is a Unix hack you have to apply to set the default library to the 32-bit library. that means all your apps that require 64-bit mode won’t run.
Also, It was reported above that Moneydance won’t import files from Quicken. Apparently, the newest release will import QIF files, but you have to do it one account at a time. I’m evaluating it now. More later.
Also, if you don’t trust putting your financial data into Mint.com, American Express is debuting a similar service. I think I’d trust Amex before I’d trust Intuit to keep my data secure. if you have an American Express card, check it out.
Good news that there may be light at the end of the tunnel, Rob. Let’s hope it comes before Apple comes out with OS X 10.7 or whatever and yanks Rosetta. Until then, I’m sticking with Quicken for Mac 2007 despite all the file corruptions.
Like many posting here I am a long time Quicken for Windows user (since 1995 with a current data file of 10,000+ transactions) who has had stellar experience with the program. And yes, I have always done the annual program updates…perhaps I’ve been loyal to a fault (?). I have recently purchased a MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard and—as expected—love the platform. However I continue using QFW 2010 on my Vista 64 bit desktop PC (a rock solid OS for me BTW) and have been holding off converting my desktop to the more elegant Mac platform waiting for some equivalency in features with the Mac Quicken version
I had been holding out hopes for the QE for Mac 2010 version thinking my biggest challenges would be in the conversion of my large data file. But having now read the latest entries from users and Intuit reps alike both here and on Intuit’s site, I find the “new” Mac product taking a giant step backward for serious home finance users like myself. Quicken is my #1 “killer app,” and within the program my “killer features” are investment tracking (mutual funds, 401k’s, IRAs) including detailed pricing history, integrated on-line bill pay, check printing, and loan amortization schedules (how do you really know your financial situation if you aren’t tracking your current balances on your mortgage or car loans?). From what I read QE 2010 will have NONE of those features, and it appears the program is in a quick race to the bottom of the software features list to be little more than a slick looking checkbook register (as termed by others). Sorry, but I may have come too far over the past 15 years tracking our family’s financial details.
From “Eddy’s” (at Intuit) comments here it is clear Intuit has made what they see as a business decision to go “drop-dead easy to use” and leave behind a good chunk of Mac users by:
“…trying to strike a balance between providing new features that are useful and make it easier to manage your financial life, vs bloating the product to the point where it is unusable – after all, there is a reason people have been switching to Mac, right?”
Boy, that speaks volumes…since when did complete and thorough get equated to “bloated” and “unusable”? I guess Intuit feels the Mac crowd is just too simple to have detailed financial needs—like personal investments with trading details! Thankfully Adobe (Photoshop, Premier) and apparently now even Microsoft (Office for Mac 2010 this fall)—my other killer apps—aren’t thinking the same way in their approaches to the Mac platform.
Many thanks to Rob for keeping this blog going. If I could put in a request to this group, I would personally look forward to a more involved discussion over Quicken alternatives, particularly the pending iBank review Rob refers to. I will not wait for Intuit any longer and see no value in badgering them about what they already see as their future in the Mac community. I will sever ties with them when I change my desktop in the next 6 months or so. I only want to go through the conversion one time, so I will appreciate whatever alternatives can be discussed here.
And before someone reminds me about the ability to use Parallels (or the equivalent) and run Windows on the Intel Mac—I know all about that. But there’s something about buying a new Mac, then buying additional software to run Windows, then buying Windows 7, then buying Windows security software, all to keep buying Intuit’s Windows version of Quicken, that just seems all backwards. Plus it reinforces Intuit’s continuing design and marketing behavior! Time for a change if I can find one. Thanks.
In response to Eddy about specifics…
Features such as using Quicken Bill Pay through Quicken and pushing data into Turbo tax and investment tracking don’t really seem like complex features. They are necessary features for normal people and ones I would expect to have in a $60 program from Intuit. I’ve been able to utilize these features for years in the windows versions, making my life "drop-dead" easy.
While your transparency is appreciated, I can see no reason to purchase a product without these features…period. Should the Quicken team decide to include these features in this Mac release, I would imagine many Mac users would give the 60 day trial a whirl. Is that not your ultimate goal?
Additionally,
Moving from PC to Mac was to make my computer use easier and more stable (less viruses, crashes, etc). There is a vast difference between making a program "easy to use" and "dumbing it down". Please don’t assume this means Mac users don’t need and want useful features.