Review by Tyler Forge

OK, it does what I bought it for, mostly, eventually. I got out of the quicken habit many years ago when I didn’t upgrade. My previous experience was that the the software was fine but that intuit was annoying in that they never lost an opportunity to market to me or install unwanted crap on my computer. Well, my new experience is that they did manage to miss a few annoyance opportunities but have addressed those problems. I wish they had paid as much attention to shipping a better product.

Seriously, this version is slower than the one I used in 1996 and that was on a computer from that era - about 250 times slower and smaller than my current one. The new quicken doesn’t download account data any better or faster in spite of the broadband versus the old modem connection. It’s still doing the slow agonizing one account after another thing too. The user interface feels positively sluggish. Note, this is on a brand new laptop that is otherwise fine.

Having run software organizations, my suspicion is that quicken is a legacy product that no one at Intuit is comfortable programing anymore. They do their best to adapt to new versions of windows, but that appears to be about all. Other than that, they bandage what they must to keep this cash cow a-milking. They probably don’t even have a product engineering team in place anymore. Nothin’ there but marketing folks and a product manager pairing up phone support contracts with the cheapest possible suppliers. They will however, find new and innovative ways to market to us.

Good for them, they have a monopoly and are willing to use it.

Hmmm, this market is starving for a competitive product …