Some companies get it, some don't

I have used Quicken & Quick-Tax for several years. I've been happy to promote a Canadian company and despite some grumblings they do have some good features.

Every year it seems that I question whether or not it is worth the money to upgrade - but most times I give in to the temptation of a few new features.

When I started up my Quicken program the other day it warned me that my license is about to expire. I thought that odd since I thought I was on a continual monthly fee.

Apparently I am on a monthly fee for their services (mainly the stock tracker and downloading transactions from banks) but it was set to expire after a year.

I phoned up asked a few questions, got half-decent answers after a few minutes of being on hold, lengthened my online service contract (it now can go until 2006), and when I participated in their phone survey afterwards I gave good marks for the service people.

The product people, or the group that decides how it is marketed, I have a 1 out of 9 to.
Despite being a customer for several years, and normally upgrading or getting the new version - I have to go out and buy a new version if I want to upgrade.

There is no automatic process, there really isn't even a non-automated process. More to my point is there is no loyalty discount, there is no benefit of me having a version already and wanting some new functionality.

I need to get a complete new version (at no discount), and uninstall the old one, install the new one, probably sit on hold to activate the new one…

Congratulations Quicken people - you're a big company now. I don't like you.

I bet I can probably find somewhere a competitive upgrade discount where I can switch to Microsoft Money for a cheaper price.

The old adage: If you don't want to look after your customers, someone else will.

For the amount of functionality in there I would think it is not impossible for a group of open source developers to deliver much of what is already in Quicken.

The stock ticker stuff is done on a thousand web-sites, so it cannot be too difficult to implement.
The downloading transactions interface is not too complicated either. I would say the only difference between transactions to Quicken and CDDB information coming into my music player is that the one set of information is coming from banks (bank coincidentally is Latin for "we'll find a way to charge you").

But I am hoping there is somebody out there that is up to the challenge - and I for one would certainly help the effort.