Lion-Compatible Quicken 2007 for Mac Promised in ‘Early Spring’
Intuit today sent out an email to its Quicken for Mac customers providing an update on the company's efforts to develop a version of Quicken 2007 compatible with OS X Lion. We noted earlier this year that Intuit was looking …
Context & Ripple Effects
Quicken 2007 remains the Mac version many customers actually trust: after Intuit's February 2010 relaunch of Quicken for Mac drew poor marks from critics for an underwhelming upgrade, the older release stayed the de facto standard. But when OS X Lion arrived in mid-2011 it dropped the runtime that older code depended on, stranding those users on Snow Leopard.
Back in July 2009 Intuit publicly denied speculation it would abandon the Mac desktop product, and today's customer email is the latest installment of that promise: rather than ship a new version, Intuit says a Lion-compatible Quicken 2007 will arrive in early spring — a compatibility patch for its most loyal base while the modern rewrite remains unloved.
First-order effects
- Mac users who have held off upgrading to Lion specifically to keep Quicken 2007 running now have a named window — early spring — for moving to Lion without losing access to their financial data.
- Intuit is committing engineering effort to porting years-old code instead of iterating on the 2010 rewrite, an implicit concession about which product its customers actually use.
Second-order effects
- A workable Lion-compatible Quicken 2007 keeps personal-finance customers inside Intuit's desktop ecosystem through tax season, blunting any incentive to defect to competing Mac money-management tools or to Intuit's own Mint service while the desktop line stalls.
- Rival Mac finance software gains its clearest opening yet: every month the flagship Intuit product runs on patched legacy code is a month competitors can pitch a native alternative to dissatisfied upgraders.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, each major OS X transition becomes a forced-maintenance event for vendors of legacy Mac software, with compatibility patches standing in for genuine product investment — a structural drag on the Mac as a platform for long-lived vertical applications.
The trend: Apple's platform transitions are turning long-lived Mac applications into maintenance liabilities, pushing vendors like Intuit into patching aging code between stalled rewrites.