[moneydance] "Intuit Quickens the Pace of Reverse Change"

[Victor Roberts]

Ric Werme wrote:
> Apparently Quicken isn't treating customers any better than they
> were when left their fold.
> 
> It might be a good time to talk to banks about supporting Moneydance
> better.
> 
> http://weblog.infoworld.com/gripeline/archives/2007/03/intuit_quickens.html
> says in part:
> 
>   Intuit's dedication to sunsetting older versions of its products often leads
>   it to remove features. "It comes as no surprise to see that the folks at
>   Intuit are at it again, with Quicken 2004 now being sunsetted in favor of
>   2007," wrote one reader. "As you noted in 2005, the 1999 version sunsetted
>   after five years, and now we are down to only three years. But the worst
>   thing about this is that 2004 is the last version that supported QIF file
>   import and at least one of my financial institutions does not support the
>   newer methodology that I believe Intuit charge them pretty heavily for.
> 
>   Perhaps the oddest Quicken complaint involves a problem that seems to be the
>   result of both Intuit's fondness for crippleware and indifference to
>   customer support issues. "My latest nightmare with the increasingly
>   irresponsible Intuit tech support transformed a one-minute solution into a
>   six-hour nightmare," ... It turns out that Quicken data filenames cannot be
>   more than 8 letters and numbers long and that the full filename path cannot
>   exceed 39 characters. Once I used my file manager to change the name of my
>   Quicken file to a shorter name, the file opened without any difficulty.

The 8-character file name limit, which comes from MS-DOS, is related to
the fact that some code in Quicken was never updated when Windows added
support for so-called long file names.

I use an old version of Quickbooks for my business.  We have all been
told that no version of Quick books earlier than QB 2007 will run on
Vista because "Microsoft has made Vista more complicated."  The real
reason turns out to be that Intuit software has never been Windows
Certified because it violates various rules that Microsoft has
established for well-behaved programs.  Older versions of Windows did
not enforce the rules, but Vista does.  Intuit has had years to clean up
their code but didn't care until Vista locked them out.

Vic Roberts