I bought QuickBooks 2005 for the business. It worked fine, but suddenly stopped downloading my online transations. A little popup says that the regular software services still worked, but after 3 years other ‘special’ services will be discontinued. By special services, it meant online downloads- which I considered a normal part of the QuickBooks package. It’s a sneaky way to force people to upgrade every 3 years, even when they don’t need to or want to. It won’t even import a pre-downloaded OFX file. How lame.
Annoying popups will keep harassing you to upgrade as well. Clearly, the hunger for corporate profit outpowers the desire to make the software useful for the end user.
Since my 2005 software no longer works, I did indeed buy an upgrade. Upgrades, as it turns out, are exactly the same cost as buying the package brand new. In fact, I saved $50 from buying QuickBooks on Amazon for $150 instead of buying the special low ‘upgrade’ price of $200 from QuickBooks direct. What a scam.
But now that I have QuickBooks 2008, even though I haven’t owned it 2 weeks, it’s already pestering me to upgrade to 2009! …claiming that it’s way better than that OLD version.
This is being posted to the ‘Marketing Tricks & Scams’ category.
