What do you do if your customers are happy with older versions of your software and you want to make more money off of them? Why you force them to upgrade by taking away some of the functionality of their older versions. That’s what Intuit is doing with Quicken users. People who rely on older versions of Quicken, 2001 & 2002, to download their financial data from banks and brokerages must upgrade to Quicken 2005 or lose this time-saving feature, says the publisher of the popular personal finance package.
From the PCWorld article: 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….
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.
Isn’t it nice to have so much business that you can openly ignore part of your customer base and not have to worry about it?
The worst part is, this is only half the story. Intuit is screwing its customers, sure, but it is extorting banks. Believe it or not, the new file format is essentially the same open standard used by all banks and most other accounting applications… but Intuit’s version requires online “validation.” In short, the program phones home to see if your bank paid them. Yes, an “Intuit Tax” to use your own data from your bank in a program you already paid for.
Lots of people use Quicken, so lots of banks are just paying up. But for smaller banks and credit unions? Five to six figures is not pocket change. It would be cheaper for many of them to give away free copies of Microsoft Money than it would be to buy into Intuit’s licensing scheme.
If only this side of the story got wider play. Talk about questionable business practices.