unscriptured

Posted in unscriptured, by Toby T, Friday, July 15th, 2011 at 12:01 am.

Like most people, I have a lot of faults. One of mine is loyalty. It takes a lot to lose me as a customer once I’ve determined that you have a good brand that meets my needs and has an acceptable value proposition. All the pants I own are Levi’s, despite a considerable amount of bad sewing that I’ve encountered the last several years. I’m still willing to buy Sony, though only after seriously evaluating each purchase against their competitors, since they’ve mostly behaved themselves since that whole root-kit debacle a few years ago. And I stuck with Apple through even their leanest years, and despite their appalling level of control freakism.

But Intuit… They’ve finally pushed me away. I’ve been using Quicken almost since it first appeared on the Mac. I loyally upgraded to every other version, whether it had any new features I cared about or not. But their last new version was in 2007, and because of my “every other” rule, I’m still on Quicken 2006. But that alone is not what finally chased me off. They’ve just announced that Quicken won’t run on the new version of Mac OS X that’s about to be released. The reason why is because all of Quicken’s versions still require PowerPC emulation to run. In the five years that Apple has been shipping Intel machines (after pre-announcing the move by a year or so) Intuit has not been able to produce a new version of what is little more than a glorified general ledger. They’ve put out a similar product, with the dubious moniker of “essentials” but it doesn’t include certain features that I and most other users actually do consider essential.

Even incompetence on the scale of Microsoft can’t explain this. Clearly they decided that the Mac was not worth supporting and have managed to get by on platitudes and promises while Apple has made a stunning comeback that has none-the-less not managed to capture Intuit’s attention. It was just announced this week that Macs have climbed back up to more than ten percent of current PC sales, but apparently that’s not enough.

When I told God that I was finally abandoning Intuit he wasn’t willing to recommend any replacements, but he did tell me it was about time.