Intuit Sells Quicken to H.I.G. Capital
Gregg Keizer (Hacker News, MacRumors):
Intuit yesterday said it had sold its Quicken personal finance software unit to H.I.G. Capital, a Miami-based private equity firm.
[…]
The announcement put an end to a sales process that went public last August, when Intuit told customers it was unloading three parts of its business -- Quicken, QuickBase and Demandforce -- to focus on its most profitable software and services, the QuickBooks small business accounting division and the seasonally-skewed TurboTax tax preparation group. In January, Intuit sold Demandforce to Internet Brands for an undisclosed amount.
Everybody used it and that’s what made their slow abandonment of the Apple platform so tragic. I know they still sell products for the Mac but it has been years since Quicken has been a top-notch Mac application.
To address customer complaints, Quicken is hiring a new product manager and will be doubling the size of the engineering team within the calendar year. In its FAQ about the sale, Intuit explicitly mentions Mac support[…]
My team and I know you count on Quicken to help you stay on top of your finances, and we are committed to continuing to improve your experience with Quicken. We’ve already started the journey with the new Quicken 2016 products that launched in November with new features to help consumers stay on top of their bills. In the last six months, we’ve also increased our investment in U.S.-based phone support. This is just the start of what’s to come – I invite you to watch this short video to learn more about why I’m excited about our future together.
How many times have we been promised a better Quicken? We’re talking maybe ten or fifteen years of bad history here.
For example, take a simple task: download all your financial data for the last year. Log into your bank’s site. There is no button for “last year”. You have to laboriously enter 01/01/2015..12/31/2015. Then you’re given a choice of formats. Download ALL of them, because sure as shootin’, Quicken will only import one of them, and that’s one is different for every different account! (Stunningly stoopid.)
Then try to get the statements, just try, my pretty. There is no “get me all the statements from last year.” Nope. You download them one at a time, and some of them download to the same file name! So it’s clicking around, then rename the file to “January 2015”, then repeat for the next one, etc.
Oh, you wanted the tax 1099 forms? That’s a whole ’nuther section on the web site.
Buy anything from Paypal? This is the killer. Paypal lists the payee as “Bob”. Your credit card statement lists the payee for the same transaction as “Carol”. The credit card downloaded data file lists the payee as “Ted”. And, Quicken somehow calls it “Alice”. Can you believe it in 2016?
