My most recent Weblog item about Inutit’s sunsetting policies for QuickBooks prompted readers to inform me of several others ways Intuit cripples its products in order to force customers to upgrade to the latest version.
Quicken 2000 customers have recently been notified by Intuit that as of May 18, 2004, online services for the product are being discontinued. "The reason I purchased Quicken 2000 in the first place was to do online banking," one outraged reader wrote. "Now they are requiring me to move to Quicken 2004 if I wish to continue. Can they do that? If there isn’t a law against it, there should be."
One reader discovered that a feature he uses in Quicken 2000 won’t be supported even if he upgrades to Quicken 2004. "I've been using Quicken 2000 to track my portfolio, in which I have a large number of over-the-counter securities," the reader wrote. "Today, I get a message that the online quotes feature of Quicken 2000 is going away on May 18th, and to continue to use the online download feature I need to upgrade to Quicken 2004. But Quicken 2004 does not permit you to download quotes for a number of symbols that are supported by Quicken 2000. After spending over an hour on the phone with Inutit, they told me Quicken users who trade pink sheet or other over-the-counter securities are just out of luck."
And several readers report another way Intuit encourages QuickBooks users to upgrade -- by crippling TurboTax. "Quickbooks and TurboTax integrate quite nicely, and it saves quite a bit of time and hassle re-keying data," one reader wrote. "Well, this year TurboTax 2003 won't import anything from versions of Quickbooks that are not at least 2002. We have QB 2001 and have not seen compelling features or enhancements to move from 2001 to any new version. We actually looked at 2004 and determined it was too slow, but with this little forced upgrade feature in TurboTax, if I want to be able to import data from Quickbooks, I will need to upgrade. NO FAIR!"
1:45:24 PM 
|
