(Our official reviews score the products higher.)Īnother reason that Quicken suffered: Intuit shifted its focus away from the flagship product to new moneymakers, in particular its small-business product, QuickBooks and its tax software and service, TurboTax. Few products have user reviews scores as low none of the variations of Quicken from recent years have user reviews garnering more than one-and-a-half stars out of five. That had a direct effect on the quality of the product.' You can see the effect on CNET's own reviews. More importantly, as Julie Miller, director of corporate communications for the consumer group at Intuit told me, 'Quicken made its way through the organization. It became more capable but also more complex, harder to use and much harder to get started with. The original Quicken, little more than a DOS-based checkbook and register, over time became an ambitious personal finance suite that handled budgeting, retirement planning, loans, public equities and employee stock options. The product, according to Intuit legend, started at founder Scott Cook's kitchen table in 1983 as he watched his wife struggle with paying bills. It's a shame that we think of Quicken that way, but it's Intuit's own fault that we've gotten here.
