Outside of the CAD world, forced upgrades are also frustrating customers. Quicken appears to be forcing customers to upgrade to the 2005 version of its finance software.
According to Yardena Arar writing in PC World: Quicken 2005 has dropped most of the product's longstanding ability to import of transaction data in the .qif file format (it can still import credit card data, but next year's version will drop that too).
"I have 13 years' worth of data in Quicken, and now they're telling me, 'You have to upgrade to a new version that has limitations you don't like and a user interface you don't like, or move to something that isn't as good,' " says Vic Roberts, a lighting technology consultant from Burnt Hills, New York. He has now switched to Moneydance personal finance shareware.
Susan Feinberg, an analyst (and Quicken user) who covers wholesale banking for the TowerGroup research firm, says both actions appear to be part of an ongoing effort by Intuit "to control its own expenses and to get customers to upgrade."
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