One of the companies I love to hate is Intuit. It caters to the masses of uninformed and gullible using the profits it derives from feeding that group to monopolize its industry. Like Microsoft or Ebay, people crave a better opportunity and a company that actually gives a damn about its customers. When you're a Macintosh user, you really are stuck because Intuit treates its Mac customers as an afterthought. It offers very little to the Mac community, but just enough to keep the competition out or barely in the race.
The story of Intuit reminds me of an old story. "Yea, Though I Walk through the Valley of The Shadow of Death, I fear not because I am the baddest "MF" in the Valley." In an industry ill equipped to handle people's real accounting needs, cheap, unreliable and poor quality software found a real home in Intuit. Managing Your Money used to be the relatively good stuff that I and many other users really liked. It was stomped out by Intuit, unable to compete with the massive marketing and cheap acquisition costs of Quicken. Andrew Tobias has gone onto politics and there is no sign that he's coming back to raise Managing Your Money for the Macintosh from the dead.
I bowed to the monopoly for years until I eventually was angered enough to move to Microsoft Money for Small Business which gave me smaller and different fits and of course, forced me into using a PC. Still, we live in a world of simply bad accounting software for the consumer or small business. I've test driven most major brands and miss my "Managing Your Money" deeply. Tobias' software quit making upgrades years ago and newer operating systems no longer support it in the Macintosh world. In all fairness, I had some success with the antiquated Intuit Quickbooks Pro for Macintosh, which was much more reliable than Quicken for the Macintosh (all versions to 2003). However, for "old software" it was extremely costly. (Even with the new stuff, you can't ad pictures of your inventory and Intuit doesn't seem to realize the world is using online business and auctions to sell their goods. Quickbooks Support was and is very expensive and virtually useless to these ends.) Newer versions of Quickbooks are still a big dissappointment. For starters, the help is damn near useless. It leaves you with options, but no ability to click on them to see what the options are. In other words, nobody completed the help files! You sit there staring at your screen wondering what you were supposed to do. Fortunately, Quickbooks comes with a manual, and so far, that trusted hard copy is coming in handy to a point. The program is still using badly written manuals and help screens which push some into actually paying for tech support to get answers to simple questions.(8/24/05).
Unfortunately, due to the inadequacies of the software and the built in difficulties inherent with switching software companies mid-stream, people and businesses feel compelled to settle with whatever software they have no matter how awful it is–kinda like staying with incumbent politicians! They are dealing with "the Devil they know!" Those dissatisfied with Intuit feel stuck with it. Intuit's monopoly works by crushing or buying the competition with their massive profits, including specialized industry software for retailers and contractors and others. Chairmen and Founder Scott Cook eloquently stated the reasoning behind Intuit's success in the Nov 22 issue of Information Week. However, in my mind, sometimes buying the competition and letting it die can be as profitable as developing the acquired products. Microsoft knows this lesson well. While Cook sited his marketing prowess, I immediately thought to myself how Intuit is a marketing machine pushing poor products on addicts who eventually wish they never started with it in the first place. It is the "LSD" of financial software. As in the drug world, stopping the use of Intuit products is easier said than done. For example, in Quickbooks, you have a purchasing history which calculates the average cost of goods. That can't simply be transferred to another program. In other words, you are simply stuck if you need that feature to remain accurate. Moving to say Microsoft, means you'll have to start calculating costs all over again. The industry is fully aware of the advantages of not living by some standards and I'm sure this doesn't escape Scott Cook. I envision his mind's wheels turning with the following: "Sell them the software cheap. Once you have them, kill them with upgrades that don't do much but seem to be required. After all, our customers are not likely to switch no matter how much they hate our product."
I imagine that when customers saw Quicken's price vs. Andrew Tobias's Managing Your Money, they went with the lower price even if back in the day, the software couldn't add correctly, which in the accounting world is a real "no-no." Imagine checking accounts being off a penny. You'd rake your mind to find the error only to eventually learn that it was defective Intuit software. Both Intuit and Microsoft have options in the menu "to repair your data." The customer has to ask why the data ever needs to be repaired? In some instances, these repair options have been totally ineffective. When you use years of data, you eventually get hit pretty hard, to the extent that my Macintosh actually wouldn't work, even after reloading the programs, repairing data and even reloading my back-up data. Quicken would immediately corrupt the back-up files too! This is absolutely inexcusable in accounting software from any company. Yet this is the defacto standard we live with while Intuit, more or less, sets the bar and makes a relatively greedy little fortune. We all just have to learn how to do the limbo because that bar is awfully low!
Meanwhile current "stuck" customers are forced to pay an arm and a leg for much needed support to figure out how to make Intuit products really do what they were said they'd do on the cover of the box. They hide the fact that the moon and stars have to be exactly in the right place for the program to work. To the casual check book only user, Quicken may seem like a great product until they find out after a few years that Quicken screwed up the records and check books no longer balance, or that Quicken is fried and tech support can't fix it, or when reloading the program, it continues to corrupt documents when saved. That is when I gave up and seriously consider paper accounting. I actually know a guy who does his books that way and who also seems very happy.
The real problem lies not in the currently expensive option of using Oracle (which owns your data) or in Microsoft which is too preoccupied with security issues to do anything right these days. MS Money is full of its own tech support demanding bugs, especially with MS Money for Small Business where one can't even find a book available to learn how to use it. It's online support is attrocious.
The accounting industry is severely software impaired and Intuit has been far from the answer. All of this in the days of Sarbanes-Oxely, where companies are supposed to be on top of their books. We need to have links to online businesses and shopping carts. We need to own our own data and have it universally translatable between accounting programs. We need to have pictures of our inventory included. We need to have a great software company where our data is safe. In America, I would venture to say that the use of Intuit products has cost American's billions of dollars in lost revenue.
If anybody knows of a truly great software for accounting and small businesses that works on Macs, PCs or Linux machines, please let me know at webmaster@getem.net