Adobe has been raked over the coals by playing it safe and waiting until the next major release of their products. Intuit has one upped them by releasing a new version two months after the Intel announcement (Quicken 2006), then a whole year another (Quicken 2007) that was still PowerPC only with no word on when a Universal Binary would arrive.
Intuit of late has not been hot on the Mac. The Mac version has lagged in features way behind the Windows version. Now to get native execution, you have to run the Windows version using Boot Camp or Parallels. Interesting coincidence, isn’t it? Suddenly the fastest, most feature complete option for running Quicken on your Mac is running it in Windows. Oh, I’m sure I’ll be labeled a doom and gloomer for this, but can we really expect continued real development of Quicken for Mac?
The last whole year of development yielded improved 401k support and a widget. Maybe Intuit won’t outright kill Quicken for Mac, but it’s beginning to look like they’re willing to let it atrophy until users migrate to Quicken for Windows on their own.
As I finished this, I noticed the story was updated.
Intuit representatives confirmed for Macworld that the application is not Intel-native. A company spokesperson said that Intuit “focused on features that customers told us were most important” with this update, specifying 401(k) management and paycheck features. Quicken Mac 2007 runs on Intel-based Macs using Apple’s Rosetta emulation technology; “There is not a significant performance increase when running natively on Intel-based [Macs],” the spokesperson said.
I guess that whole half speed thing was completely imagined. I must also conclude that based upon the comments on the story, that the real majority of their customer base didn’t take the survey. They’re much more concerned that it will have to run in Rosetta than the new widget. I know it’s the Intuit rep’s job to defend the product, but let’s be frank. It’s pure spin.
To me it sounds like Intuit is ready to give away this market segment. The opportunity for someone to come in and really make a killing monetarily is huge. Some enterprising set of Mac devs could easily create a product that exceeds Quicken's abilities and feature-set...
The issue of PowerPC or Universal is a moot point. Quicken for Mac (at least for anyone who has used the Win version) is next to unusable -- the functionality is so drastically less in the Mac version, it should be illegal for it to carry the same brand name.
Someone needs to directly ask Intuit about continuing Macintosh development plans. When you decode the marketing gibberish answer please post it here. I don't think it will be pretty (as hinted at by the article's author).