If the company has miscalculated the desire for the features omitted from this version, Intuit will receive yet another black eye.įinally, what will become of the upset Quicken users who need features that aren’t offered by this new app? Intuit’s official line seems to be a request that those users continue to use Quicken Deluxe 2007. If Quicken Essentials for Mac appears in Apple retail stores and becomes a hot seller-which will probably happen if Patzer’s suggestion that 80 percent of users will be satisfied by its feature set is true-then the company’s decision to release a limited-functionality product this year will have been a smart one. My conversation with Patzer suggests that he’s committed to fixing what was obviously a broken system, at least where Intuit’s Mac products were concerned, but that there was no way for him to completely rectify matters in the few months he’s been on the job.īut Internet message boards aren’t always the best barometer of how the world at large will react. The big question is, how will Quicken Essentials for Mac be received by the general public? If Internet message boards ( including our own) are any indication, there’s not a lot of love lost between Quicken users and Intuit. Apps should have a native appearance, he said, but the underlying data structures will be the same and it should be easy to go from using a desktop app to the online service and back again. It shouldn’t matter if you’re using Mac, PC, iPhone, Android, or online” when it comes to features and data availability. “Over time, you’ll start to see features and functionality for all the platforms come together. Patzer says he “personally specced out” Quicken for Windows 2011. The Budget view gives you feedback on your spending and lets you set realistic goals.īeyond that, Patzer says that you’ll see more similarities to in the desktop Quicken products. Next year, Patzer said, Intuit will release both an updated version of Essentials as well as a true Quicken Deluxe version “that would have the stock-lot accounting and potentially bill pay-those are two top candidates.” So we had to decide, do we want to put a product out that serves 80 percent of the market and is a vast improvement in so many ways, or do we delay it again? And what I thought was, given the growing popularity of the Mac platform… it was better to get a product out that’s good for 80 percent of the market.” “It’s called ‘Mac Essentials’ because it’s got the essential features used by 80 percent of the users we’ve surveyed and talked to. “When I came in, I looked at the Mac product and said, ‘Holy crap, we haven’t put one of these out in three years,’” Patzer said. It’s got access to 8,000 financial institutions-more than twice as many as the previous version-and Intuit says that number will jump to 16,000 “within the next few months.” Quicken Essentials is a new app, re-written entirely using Apple’s development environment, using native interface elements that make the app feel like a lost cousin of iWork. Now here comes the $70 Quicken Essentials for Mac, a new product marching proudly into the maw of a user base that’s ready to tear the product, and Intuit, into tiny little pieces. Quicken Online will be phased out, the company announced in November, to be replaced by. With Patzer in charge, Intuit’s personal-finance group has shown some signs of a change in direction.

(Buying a competitor and making its head your new leader-talk about an admission that your own company has lost its way.)

It seems the most likely explanation for Intuit buying and immediately installing its founder and CEO, Aaron Patzer, as the new VP and general manager of Intuit’s personal finance group. Perhaps that confusion and intransigence on Intuit’s part was a sign of a larger problem with the management of the company’s software products. In July 2009 the company announced another delay, to 2010, with an explanation that it was going “back to the drawing board” with the product. We got a preview of Quicken Financial Life in early 2009, but like a mirage in the desert, the product kept fading into the distance. That date came and went, and a new date was promised - summer 2009. In early 2008, the company announced it would completely rewrite Quicken, and promised a new product called Quicken Financial Life for Mac in fall of 2008. After that, more than a year went by with rumors escalating that the product was not long for this world. It’s been nearly four years since the most recent release of Quicken for the Mac, Quicken Mac 2007 ( ), released in mid-2006. The new product offers a promising new interface, but faces a mass of built-up anger from users who feel betrayed by the company’s mismanagement of the product. After numerous false starts over several years, Intuit plans to announce the release of Quicken Essentials for Mac on Thursday.

Delte all data on quicken for mac