Quickbooks my all time hated favorite
Made the huge mistake of started using QB Pro for last 12 years. Jumped right in, just like every other stooge who even thinks of starting their own biz, we gotta get QB to run the mission critical accounting side of the biz. At the time the options were sluggish, cumbersome competitors or QB with it slick, sleek GUI.
Over the course of that 12 years I have come to detest QB/Intuit more than any other software vendor. Even more than Symantec's pile of crap.
QB has 96% of the Small Business Accounting Software market. Did someone from the back of the room mumble MONOPOLY. Well I heard that, and they're right. Now I'm O.K. with someone having a monopoly if they leave the slaving slobs alone and just let them be part of the monopoly. But QB/Intuit is different.
Every three years they clobber you over the head with the the BS line that all the new wonderful features they've been working on need to be installed in a new upgraded program. What are some of those new features, you ask? Last upgrade, one of the more convincing marketing points I now had the ability to use was foreign currency symbols in my transactions. WTF, my customer base is withing 5 blocks of my biz. Why do I need to purchase a new $160 upgrade for that feature?
The accounting kernel has been basically the same since it's inception, some of the bugs were worked out with subsequent patches and upgrades.
(So my major rub is, why do I need to upgrade if the basic kernel is still the same. I'll answer that for you, shareholder value.)
But around 2002 QB/Intuit started requiring a repurchased program to become compliant with their newly introduced feature sets.
Now, if you use one of their premium features like credit card processing, you don't have a choice. They send you a notice that you have x number of days to purchase the new upgrade or your premium features are cancelled. Meaning you biz doesn't operate smoothly.
Sure, Intuit bull sheets you around by saying the program will always work, but the premium features won't be supported. There by strong arming / extracting the $160 out of you.
Every time I get these notices I feel like Guido, one of the Godfather's thugs, has darkened my door. Hey, Skye, the Gadfawder asks me to stop by and remind you that yous gotta pay more respect to the Gadfawder.
Even Microsoft isn't as brazenly aggressive as QB/Intuit, they at least let you keep XP running for years past their product upgrades. Doesn't happen with QB, it's either pay or no play.
And that's why I absolutely hate QB/Intuit. Once you are lured into the caressing cradle of their corporate arms you can never leave. They know that, once they have them locked into the sophisticated features of their product, they can abuse their customer base the way they do and not give a sheet about them.
