The Mac has been gaining market share the last few years but one of the biggest money management programs, Quicken, has been AWOL with updates since 2007. To be honest, I thought Intuit was just going to let it die without giving it a funeral. I wasn’t alone in that view. Many others believed Intuit was giving up on a client-based application for the Mac in lieu of its online service
That is about to change this year with a new version with native Intel support. I took a break from the CES madness and sat down with Aaron Patzer, the VP and GM of Personal Finance at Intuit. Aaron came to Intuit when they bought Mint.com for $170 Million where he was the founder/CEO.
Aaron gave me a sneak peak of the new version, and while I am under the hand shake agreement to not rattle off what it fully does, I can say it looks to be promising and feature rich. The other great thing to see is the management at Intuit are letting Aaron do his magic and build great products. There have been many promising and great product teams bought by larger firms which were killed by neglect and politics once taken over by the larger firm. WebTV comes to mind as one. This is great news for the Mint Fans out there, since it is loved by young people who have different financial goals than the older users of Quicken.
Aaron did say the importing of data from the PC versions of Quicken has been a top priority. They know many of you switchers out there have been keeping a PC around or using Parallels or VMware to just do your finances with Quicken and have large amounts of data which you want to take with you from your from past version of the product to the Mac. From our talk it looks like Intuit with be moving forward on both a package software and an online products for the foreseeable future.
I am looking forward to reviewing Mac Quicken product soon. After the talking to Arron, it looks like he is driving the both Mint and the Mac version of Quicken into great products with great futures.
I suppose you are one of the many young mint fans who don’t care about tracking investments or about online bill pay?
But you will be able to marvel at the yummy glossy candy interface and be able to import from a full featured version, about three features which will be available in Quicken Essentials.
This is a dead product and Aaron is a joke as witnessed by his ridiculous blog post.
http://blog.quicken.intuit.com/product-update/2009/12/21/confessions-of-a-mac-convert/
I’m sure the roadmap for Quicken Mac remains short and under featured.