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A locked-in financial application like Quicken Mac doesn't fit with this world view. Patzer has indicated to me that his vision is to give consumers access to their data no matter what platform they are on.
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She also said the conversion of data from Windows to the Mac version will be a one-way trip.
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I gather the conversion code is yet to be completed, since Miller called it "a top priority," not an existing feature. Furthermore, Quicken Mac will not be able to read and write files from Quicken for Windows. Based on my talk with Patzer, I strongly doubt he will devote resources to its separate code base. Miller told me it's scheduled to be released in February 2010. Quicken for the Mac: At MacWorld 2009 in January, Scott Cook, now chairman of Intuit's executive committee, handed me a copy of the beta version of Quicken for the Mac, then called Quicken Financial Life.
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(To decipher: She probably means that the free online personal finance site will be kept feature-light to encourage users who want more capability to pay for the full desktop version of Quicken.) And compared with Mint, she said, Quicken Online will be "more connected to the desktop experience." Miller told me more recently that Mint will be seen as a "customer acquisition engine" at Intuit. He made it clear that he sees it as inefficient to maintain them all. "We have four personal finance code bases," he said, referring to Mint, Quicken Online, Quicken for the Desktop and Quicken for the Mac. Quicken Online versus Mint: Patzer told me, when he came in to be interviewed for a recent Reporters' Roundtable podcast, that Quicken Online, Intuit's existing Web-based personal finance products and its competitor to Mint, will "go away" sometime after the companies merge. Ultimately I believe this will be good for personal finance users although I expect a few rough years for Intuit employees and their customers, too. What will Patzer do with the ailing Quicken product line? While he hasn't taken the role officially yet - the acquisition has yet to close - already we can see that there may be a few conflicts as the two products come under unified management. (TurboTax will stay with Patzer's new boss, Dan Maurer, senior vice president of the Intuit consumer group.) When the Mint acquisition closes, Patzer will be vice president and general manager of the personal finance group at Intuit, which will include Mint as well as Quicken.
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Patzer, who had held several engineering jobs including at Sony (working on the PlayStation) and at Internet start-ups founded the company in his own kitchen table moment when he became frustrated with existing personal finance software apps - like Quicken.Īnd now the upstart is moving into the big house. The way we grow this, we realized, was to look for acquisitions."įortunately, while Quicken was alienating users, in 2005 Mint was born. We weren't thinking beyond the desktop solution. As Miller says, "There were decisions made over time that had the unintended consequence of putting the Quicken business where it was starved for focus and resources."įinally, though, the light began to dawn at Intuit. (Our official reviews score the products higher.)Īnother reason that Quicken suffered: Intuit shifted its focus away from the flagship product to new moneymakers, in particular its small-business product, QuickBooks and its tax software and service, TurboTax. Few products have user reviews scores as low none of the variations of Quicken from recent years have user reviews garnering more than one-and-a-half stars out of five. That had a direct effect on the quality of the product." You can see the effect on CNET's own reviews. More importantly, as Julie Miller, director of corporate communications for the consumer group at Intuit told me, "Quicken made its way through the organization. It became more capable but also more complex, harder to use and much harder to get started with. The original Quicken, little more than a DOS-based checkbook and register, over time became an ambitious personal finance suite that handled budgeting, retirement planning, loans, public equities and employee stock options. The product, according to Intuit legend, started at founder Scott Cook's kitchen table in 1983 as he watched his wife struggle with paying bills.

It's a shame that we think of Quicken that way, but it's Intuit's own fault that we've gotten here.
