Quicken for Mac is such a sad state of affairs. No competition. No incentive to get better.

The Mac version lags far behind the Windows version. And Intuit has no motivation to fix this situation.

It's frustrating. They've got us by the neck.

Today, I fired up Quicken 2004 to be greeted with a message that support for Quicken 2004 would be discontinued on April 30. With that, my ability to download transactions, update security prices, stuff that I do quite a bit, was going to go away. Essentially, Intuit was saying, "We haven't gotten money from you in a while - pay up." The equivalent to electronic blackmail....

It's totally reasonable for companies to obsolete support for software. Most obsolete software after 5 years or so, and usually by then, there's enough new features to warrant an upgrade. Not so with Quicken. Oh sure, some things have gotten nicer, and they've fixed a few of my complaints. But it wasn't enough to make me pay $70 to upgrade. Well, they finally forced me into it, and I'm not happy. Even with the $20 discount, it's still extortion. There aren't enough "new features" to warrant an upgrade. I call this a $50 mandatory software maintenance fee.

And, to show how much Intuit doesn't care - they couldn't even be bothered to make Quicken 2007 a Universal app to natively support the new Intel-based Macs. Everyone else has or has it on their roadmap. Intuit doesn't. Quicken users don't have any other options.

For once, I wish Microsoft would step in here and write some software. Microsoft Money for Mac. MMMmmmmmm....