My frustration at Intuit for trotting out another shoddy upgrade of their rickety, old Quicken program has led to frustration at Macworld, which has routinely rated Quicken far more highly than it deserves. I know this thread is dormant, but I was so frustrated at Macworld that I decided to write their editors a lengthy complaint about this repeated over-rating of Quicken; I also decided to register for this message board to share my complaint with any other poor soul who is up late on a Saturday night trying to balance the checkbook with Quicken. Here is my letter to Macworld, for what it is worth:
For the life of me I cannot understand how this product earned four mice from your reviewer. Yes, over the course of Quicken's long product life it has accumulated an "excellent array of financial tools" and now reigns as the "800 pound gorilla" in personal finance software. But all this means is that the product is bloated with features - it doesn't mean that the program itself works intuitively or efficiently. It does neither. A four mouse product should make my life easier; it should not make me long, as Quicken does, for the days of paper bank statements and checkbook registers. A four mouse product should also provide much better customer service than Quicken does; I can only say that after spending the past 75 minutes e-chatting with Quicken's tech support people, not to mention the last four years struggling with Quicken's very user un-friendly interface, I am determined never to purchase another Intuit product again.
Macworld has run four straight reviews of Quicken in which you have awarded it four mice, despite the fact that in Quicken 2004 you uncovered what you referred to as a "major bug". I don't think a financial software that could get you an IRS audit deserves four mice, and for the life of me I cannot understand how Macworld does. But the fact that Macworld overlooked this "major bug" presents a substantial reason to question Macworld's credibility. In addition, your own reviews have noted that successive versions of Quicken offered little in the way of new features; one might say their new features have amounted to nothing more than lipstick on an 800-pound gorilla.
Perhaps one of the drawbacks of the "grade inflation" evident in your last four reviews of Quicken for Mac is that the Mac development community is unable to see how poorly served Mac users have been by Quicken. But at the same time, it seems clear that Intuit is not interested in Mac customers. Why doesn't Macworld acknowledge this fact that so many of the rest of us have come to know through hours of frustrating experience? If, instead of marveling at the size of the 800-pound gorilla, Macworld would state the obvious - the gorilla is fat, old, and close to death - we might get a few more animals in the Mac financial software menagerie.
