Tossing QuickBooks into the Sunset

It was gong to cost over a hundred bucks.

Now I'm a simple man. Do simple things. When a strange lady calls me on the phone and starts asking for my credit card number, I have questions. Like "can you prove who you are", "why do you want my money", "do you have a MySpace account," and most importantly, "do you take payments?"

As it turns out, my QuickBooks 2003 will not work online any more after April 30th, 2006. She was calling me to get me to buy an upgrade. Why will it stop working? Is it because of some massive change in the internet protocols happening on May 1st? Is there basic change in addition or subtraction coming up?

Nope. It's because the management at Intuit are greedy bastards who want to suck money from their customers for providing very little in value in return.

This is the way of all software development -- Microsoft, Intuit, Sun -- you name them. First you write a program to sell people. And let's face it, folks, adding and subtracting in a checkbook isn't exactly rocket science. Any first-year programmer could write a checkbook program in their sleep.

You market it. Hey! It's a big success. You establish a user base. What do you do next? Well, you've already got umpteen users, as any marketing person will tell you; you need to sell into your already established base. That means upgrades.

For the first few versions, of course, upgrades do something valuable, like make the program work better for users. But come on, guys! By version 6 or 7 you're just in this thing to make money, and the folks at home are smart enough to figure it out. Do you really think Microsoft Word should have as many features as it does? Can anybody even remember all the junk that's in there? Heck, you could probably do your taxes just using options from Word. In fact, I know you could. That's feature overkill.

But software manufacturers have nowhere else to go. You have this big staff of programmers, this big company, all this money coming in. Surely you've got to keep the ball rolling. That's what they pay management to do, after all.

Nobody who goes into business is going to give up after just one monetary transaction with their customer. That's the stupidest business plan imaginable. So they got to come up with more stuff to get you to pull the credit card out. But the basic problem the program is trying to solve, whatever that is, is basically SOLVED in the first few versions. Probably in the first version. That's why people bought it to begin with.

This problem is basically unsolved. Microsoft spends millions each year trying to tweak Office, it's big cash cow. Perhaps they'll get a few more useful versions out of it. I kind of doubt it. So they spend a lot of money researching what kinds of new junk to throw in there so that they can convince you that you have a NEW problem you didn't know about that the new version solves. There are a lot of "feature suckers" (they call us early adopters) who like to have the latest and greatest on our desktops. So maybe they'll get some more mileage. Those marketing guys are smarter than me. I'm sure there's some new thing I have to have in MS Office that they will be selling me. Gee. I can't wait to find out what I'm lacking now.

But Quickbooks? Get real, guys! It's a stupid program for balancing my business checkbook. Does the world of business accounting change radically every year? I don't think so. So the fine folks at Intuit have decided that their products need a "sunset". That means, hey, you get three years to run our product and then we make it self-destruct. Then you gotta buy another version.

They must have borrowed this strategy from the cell phone people, who know their customers hate them but don't seem to care. I wonder how long it takes to turn from a "customer" to a "sucker" in the mind of Intuit management?

Now understanding it was not a romantic liaison that the young lady wanted, I laughed at her and got off the phone. Then I said some ugly things to the wall, things which I learned in the marines and which I will not repeat here. The wall had no answer.

Last night I'm paying my monthly bills on QuickBooks when "Wham!" the online payment system barfs on me. The message I get was something like "in order to keep the quality of your service high, you need to upgrade to QuickBooks 2006 to use our online payment system"

Oh yeah. I have to keep the quality of their system high. Here I am worrying that sending a stupid 400-byte transaction across a secured socket was somehow degrading. The world of physics is changing under my feet, and I need to pay two hundred bucks to keep it stable. Now I can feel assured that somebody else is worrying about these things too.

So -- as they say in the Sopranos -- "whatcha gonna do?" We gotta go upgrade QuickBooks. I guess I would be less happy if somebody came to my house with a gun and stole the money from me, but not by much.

BTW, Microsoft is coming out with a "subscription" plan for it's software. Basically they want money from you each month, and your software keeps working. It's like a little sunset each month for you. And that's not even giving you all the marketing BS they did with new versions. That's just keeping the thing running for you. Maybe a couple years from now all of our software could have a sunset every day, just like the real sunset. And when the big old yellow sun goes down in the West, a big "Cha-Ching!" will sound out all across the land.

It will be a marketer's dream.