Quicken for Mac, produced by Intuit, was one of the premier personal finance management applications for Mac users. The last version, dubbed Quicken for Mac 2007, was built for PowerPC systems. Due to the emulator, many users undoubtedly never noticed that Quicken was not a "native" application.
The emulator was never intended to be used indefinitely, and Apple never said it would stick around forever. Sure enough, when Mac OS X 10.7 ("Lion") shipped, the world discovered that the emulator was no longer present. Its absence might have gone unnoticed except that, of course, Quicken for Mac 2007 stopped working.
Now Intuit has issued a (very) belated apology to its Quicken for Mac customers. The open letter from the new general manager of the Intuit Personal Finance Group, Aaron Forth, reads in part:
As you may know, Quicken for Mac 2007 does not currently work on Apple's latest operating system, Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion). I understand the frustration this may have caused you and have put a team in place to address this issue. I am happy to announce that we will have a solution that makes Quicken 2007 for Mac "Lion-compatible" by early spring.I'll give Forth the benefit of the doubt and assume he didn't share responsibility for Intuit's strategic direction regarding Quicken for Mac. He might be perfectly sincere in his desire to keep Quicken relevant to Mac users.
I still have no reason to continue being a Quicken user. You don't, either.
Intuit used Apple's emulator as a crutch. The emulator let Quicken for Mac 2007 keep running, thus keeping it a (nominally) viable product while allowing Intuit to avoid committing significant resources to maintaining it. What direct evidence do I have that Intuit didn't commit significant resources? None -- but tell me, do you think that if Intuit had had a sincere desire to keep Quicken for Mac up to date, it would have sat on its hands for four years? If there had been some technical obstacle preventing the (trivial) recompilation of Quicken for Intel hardware, Intuit would have raised the issue with Apple and it would have been resolved long ago. I conclude that there was and is no technical obstacle: the problem is political, and it's inside Intuit. Intuit simply didn't give a damn about Quicken for Mac but didn't want to admit it. Only when enough customers made a stink, and perhaps failed to take Intuit up on its not so subtle hints to transition over to its Mint.com subsidiary, did the company decide it needed to do something to keep Quicken for Mac 2007 running.
Does this mean Intuit has had a change of heart, and will treat Quicken for Mac as a first-class product? Maybe -- but Intuit has pissed away whatever patience and goodwill it could have expected its Mac users to have. I'm not giving the company the same benefit of the doubt I gave Forth. If Intuit truly had been interested in signalling a change of heart, its CEO would have issued a mea culpa, mea maxima culpa for the company's mishandling of Quicken for Mac. By foisting that duty onto the new group manager, Intuit's still telling us that Quicken for Mac doesn't matter.
Back in August, Jeffery Battersby wrote a piece for MacWorld listing alternatives to Quicken. Take a quick look at this piece and go with one of those alternatives. You might want to think twice about Mint.com, though, considering it's owned by Intuit, the company that left you high and dry with Quicken. Besides, Mint.com stores your data in the cloud, and while you probably don't care if the wrong people see your music collection, you might be less comfortable wondering who might be able to inspect your financial assets.
(Thanks to Daring Fireball for the link to Forth's letter.)
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