Intuit Sued Over Its Removal Of Features To Force Upgrades
from the is-this-a-class-action? dept
Last year, we wrote about our awful experience with Intuit’s Quickbooks product, where their policy of “sunsetting” a piece of software didn’t just mean that you couldn’t get support for it any more, but that certain features stopped working (specifically, we could no longer email our invoices unless we upgraded). It’s a really obnoxious process to force people to upgrade software when they really have no need to upgrade it. The software worked perfectly fine, but they simply turned off a feature to force you to buy the latest version of the software, even if you were perfectly happy with the version you had. It turns out we weren’t alone in that complaint. Wired News is running a story about others who discovered the same exact issue and mentions that Intuit recently settled a lawsuit about this very process. Unfortunately, they don’t give any details on whether or not it was a class action suit, as we definitely would qualify for it. Part of the problem, though, is that there just haven’t been too many viable other options, so Intuit has been able to get away with these kinds of forced upgrades and people have no other choice. As the article points out, that might be changing as more competitors are hitting the market — and some of them may highlight the fact that if you buy their software, it’ll actually keep working for as long as you have it.
Comments on “Intuit Sued Over Its Removal Of Features To Force Upgrades”
Not good biz
This underhanded kind of tactics gets spread rapidly in this internet age. Stupid move. Kind of reminds me of the trouble Lexmark is facing.
Re: Not good biz
>This underhanded kind of tactics gets spread rapidly in this internet age
I expect this to become more prevalent as the software industry moves to a subscription model.
Still Using Quicken 99.
Re: Re: Not good biz
I’m glad they stopped supporting QIF. It was too easy to receive duplicates and errors using QIF import. Why don’t you sue Microsoft for de-supporting Windows 3.1? Stupid lawsuit.
Re: Re: Re: Not good biz
You can still use Windows 3.1 on the machine it worked on back then. They never REMOVED features, thats the point of this lawsuit. Sure it won’t support all your devices today, but they didn’t remove any features from the product, so use windows 3.1 till your hearts content. Not a stupid lawsuit.
Re: Re: Re: Not good biz
I’m glad they stopped supporting QIF. It was too easy to receive duplicates and errors using QIF import. Why don’t you sue Microsoft for de-supporting Windows 3.1? Stupid lawsuit.
Yeah, sorry if that wasn’t clear. There’s nothing wrong with ending support for a product. That’s completely understandable. However, arbitrarily turning off features (such as the ability to email invoices) is simply obnoxious.
Re: Re: Re: Not good biz
> I’m glad they stopped supporting QIF. It was too easy to receive duplicates and errors using QIF import.
Just because you are too much of a moron to be able to use QIF doesn’t mean that others don’t have a valid reason to use it, and that there aren’t others that are quite capable of using it without duplicates and errors.
It is not a stupid lawsuit because they have not provided a replacement that costs the same or less, or provides more functionality than a QIF file. If they want to remove support for the QIF file format, they should make the effort to provide similar functionality.
5 of my 7 credit cards only support QIF data downloads. They refuse to migrate up to OFX because of Intuit’s licensing fees. Intuit would like to double-dip and charge us to remove QIF and also charge the financial institutions to remove QIF.
If someone did start a class-action suit about removal of QIF importing, I would like to see it because I would get involved.
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They screwed me!
I purchased Quickbook 2001 for $150, then agreed to pay $50 per year for the updated payroll tax tables.
You couldn’t run payroll without it. Ok, they got me there.
However, a year later they said that I had to move to a subscription model of $20 per month to get the payroll updates, but at the same time my software would be upgraded “for free”.
I never wanted new versions, but was forced if I still wanted to use Quickbooks.
Well, 8 months ago I stopped being a consultant, and went to work full time so I no longer need Quickbooks. When I called to cancel my monthly fee they said that I had to pay 8 more months because I am using the newest version of their software, or they would send a “disable” command.
Sounds like extorsion to me. Those bastards! I only use the damn software once per month anyway, and I never wanted to upgrade in the first place.
THEY WILL NEVER GET ANOTHER PENNY FROM ME EVER AGAIN! INTUIT IS EVIL!