Intuit Cripples Older Quicken Versions
Users bemoan forced upgrades and diminished functionality.
Yardena Arar
In letters and e-mail messages sent to its customers in late January, Intuit said it was ending online services and tech support for Quicken 2001 and 2002 as of April 19 "to focus resources on enhancing our products and providing support for more current versions, which are used by the vast majority of Quicken customers."
Intuit estimates that less than 2 percent of Quicken's over 15 million users still run the 2001-2002 versions. But some users are complaining bitterly about having to upgrade just to maintain the functionality they now have.
Upset Over Upgrade
"I have 13 years' worth of data in Quicken, and now they are telling me, 'You have to upgrade to a new version that has limitations you don't like and a user interface you don't like, or move to something that isn't as good,'" says Vic Roberts, a Burnt Hills, New York, lighting technology consultant.
He is unhappy that Quicken 2005 permits users to import transaction data, such as bank statements, only if their financial institutions offer support for Quicken's WebConnect or DirectConnect features, which use the .ofx format. Quicken 2005 has dropped most of the product's long-standing ability to import transaction data in the .qif file format (the program can still import credit card data, but next year's version will eliminate that feature, as well). Banks must pay Intuit to be certified for .ofx downloads into Quicken; Intuit says that almost 2300 financial institutions, including most major banks and brokerages, support .ofx.
Roberts says that he would have been glad to pay Intuit a monthly fee to help maintain the servers that the company uses to support its online services. He has now switched to Moneydance personal finance shareware ($30). Prices for Quicken 2005 range from $30 to $90, depending on version.
Money's Move
Intuit is not alone in cutting back online services for older versions of its products: The 2005 edition of Quicken's principal competitor, Microsoft Money, will support online services for just two years, after which customers must upgrade to download financial transaction data. Quicken's changes affect far more people, however--over 70 percent of people who run personal finance software use the Intuit product, according to research firm NPD Group.
Intuit spokesperson Chris Repetto says the company's decision to end .qif support was unrelated to its decision to end online services for the 2001-2002 versions of Quicken. He says the .qif format was abandoned because it was old technology that required a lot of costly customer support by both banks and Intuit, and because DirectConnect and WebConnect (which import data with one button instead of in a multistep process with a greater chance of error) provide a superior user experience.
Susan Feinberg, a Quicken user who analyzes wholesale banking for the research firm TowerGroup, disagrees. She says both actions appear to be part of an effort by Intuit "to control its own expenses and to get customers to upgrade."
Feinberg questions Intuit's assertion that banks were happy to stop supporting .qif because it produced a lot of tech support calls: "There are issues with .qif, but it has been around longer, so the banks know how to deal with them. I suspect those banks have far more issues with the online functionality [to support .ofx]."
Despite Intuit's contention that .qif was inferior, Feinberg never had a problem using it to import data--and in fact she had switched back to it after trying WebConnect.
But Repetto maintains that the people who are complaining in forums and newsgroups about either the end of support for Quicken 2001-2002 or the end of .qif import capability are a small minority. "At the end of the day, we are solving problems for millions and not a couple of people in a chat room," he says.
Yardena Arar
