
What happened to Quicken Online, post-acquisition of Mint - Cmccann7
http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/19/quicken-online-users-saw-the-bait-took-the-switch-to-mint-com-and-are-left-with-nothing/
======
rfreytag
This is the fundamental risk of building your life or business even in part on
SaaS. People can and do still use ancient client-side software for their own
reasons; much to MS' and other's frustration. With SaaS you are trusting the
operators of your key service to respect their users. No surprise that some
users are disappointed.

SaaS works but I think it works best as a cooperative rather than an
corporation with interests separate from that of it's users.

------
pragmatic
Stories like these deter people from trusting the "cloud." I use QuickBooks
for my Biz and no way would I do it online (especially after this). It's just
too important to trust to some cheeseball marketing exec.

~~~
tomjen3
So you are assuming that they are not going to do something like that to
Quickbooks? They are not going to drastically increase the price, and then
hold you ransom for all your financial history, knowing that you have to
upgrade to be able to work with your accountant but he can't read your old
files?

Just saying - desktop software isn't any safer unless you have an open
migration path available.

------
borisk
This sounds like a great opportunity for Mint clones. Implement automatic
import from Quicken and get quite a few customers.

~~~
maukdaddy
This makes me wonder how fragile parts of Mint's technology are. They couldn't
find some way to transfer the data from Quicken?

Also, Mint's new Goals feature requires you to have separate accounts. You
can't have two goals, save for car and house, both using the same account.

Both of these reek of a technology base that is fragile.

~~~
oasisbob
I can't speak to how fragile Mint's technology is internally -- although I
think the duplicate transactions showing up in my account for weeks speaks to
that -- but it's worth pointing out that acquiring the transactions for a
consumer is fragile and fraught with peril.

Mint uses a 3rd party called Yodlee for their transactional feeds. Some
(most?) of the time, Yodlee acquires their transactions using screen-scraping
of Home Banking websites. In theory, OFX could be used as well -- but -- there
is no good way to auto-discover a FIs OFX feed via a well-known URI, or
otherwise.

Quicken uses a proprietary db to link a request for a FI to a URL. This is
their secret sauce.

I died a little inside when Mint is was purchased by Intuit. By leveraging
their Quicken users, Intuit forces banks to purchase a branding identifier
(BID), otherwise Quicken won't download or parse OFX transactions. There is no
good technical reason for this. It's a classic embrace and extend: Create
format (OFX) with industry players. Modify format (QFX) and leverage existing
marketshare to force adoption. Make money at both ends.

So, yes, one could probably get the data from Quicken. But it makes very
little sense to invest time in such a squirrelly method that /still/ depends
on Intuit. (Remember the Palm/iTunes fiasco?)

------
k33n
Every time I read an article written by Michael Arrington, there is a 3rd
grade-level spelling error in it.

> Otherwise you’ve just waisted all that time your users put into the product.

It seriously drives me nuts.

------
jared314
I wonder if legacy saas products could switch to a user owned/funded model.

