I had a frustrating time with the Intuit website today. I wanted to inquire about Quicken for Linux. On the Intuit website, the email link under Contact Us was easy to find. However, instead of an email address, it presented me with a contact form. That's fine, I have no problem with a contact form being erroneously referred to as email. But one must fill in several required fields in order to send the form. One of them was "Product", or which version of Quicken I am referring to. The dropdown box was prepopulated with "Quicken for Windows", "Quicken for Mac", and a few other programs made by Intuit:
Naturally, "Quicken for Linux" was not present, nor was a generic Quicken link. So I had to lie. I chose "Quicken for Mac", knowing that my question would now be directed to an inappropriate body. No matter. I finish with the rest of the form, including my email address, a message subject, and the question text "When will Quicken for Linux be available? I use Ubuntu Linux and would like to start using Quicken". Now I've come to what appears to be the end, and I click the button:
But what have we here? Instead of a friendly message letting me know that my message is being sped to a representative that will be happy to assist me, I am presented with a "New Account" form!
I don't want to open an account with Intuit! They don't even make a version of Quicken that will run on my operating system! But to ask the question, I must comply. First rule of proprietary software: the company makes the rules, and the end user is either a sheep (follows blindly) or a snake (slithers away and good riddance too). For whatever reason, I _still_ want Quicken for Linux so I fill out my first and last name, choose a password, and then verify that the password that I've chosen is in fact the password that I want. I've come to what appears to be the end, and I click the button... But what have we here? Instead of a friendly message letting me know that my message is being sped to a representative that will be happy to assist me, I am presented with a "***Your question has not been submitted yet.***" message!
It seems that the brilliant automated systems at Intuit have deduced from my query that I'm really just asking a FAQ and they have come to the rescue with their brilliant answer that I managed to overlook while googling and browsing their site. Second rule of proprietary software: the end user is assumed to be an idiot, has made no effort to solve the issue himself, and will either live with us treating him as such or will be referred to the first rule of proprietary software. I wince and click "Finish Submitting Question" anyway. Finally, I'm given a message that my message has been submitted (not received, mind you), and a promise that "You will receive a response by email from our support department within the next day". There are also instructions on how to add information to or cancel the question, should I decide that a day is too long to wait.
Update: Two hours later, I got my reply. While Intuit's customer service sure is speedy (about on par with the Ubuntu mailing list), unfortunately I got the answer that I expected. And I've now learned the third rule of proprietary software.
Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2008 05:36:22 -0800 (PST) From: "Quicken Customer Care" <[email protected]> Subject: Quicken for Linux? [Incident: 080218-000026] Dear Dotan Cohen, Thank you for contacting Quicken Customer Care. Dotan if I understand you correctly you are asking that when will Quicken be available for Linux. As of now we don't have any plans. We are not sure. But whenever it will hit the market we'll get back to you. I hope the information which I have provided will be helpful to you. Have a great day ahead. If you need additional assistance, please reply to this e-mail or visit our support site at http://support.quicken.intuit.com where you can search our knowledge base or chat live with an agent. Have a great day and thank you for using Quicken! Respectfully, Abhishek Garg Quicken Customer Care
