Criticisms
The 1999 version of QuickBooks forced users to pay an additional fee for payroll table updates. The 2000 version of QuickBooks tried to force users to pay an additional fee for payroll tax updates for each company file. After a boycott, this fee was changed to one charge per copy of QuickBooks.
In April 2006, Intuit disabled functionality of add-on services for QuickBooks 2003 in the areas of Bill Pay, Credit Card Download, Do-It-Yourself Payroll, Employee Organizer, Merchant Service, Online Banking, Online Billing, and Support Plans and Services. Since then, Intuit has disabled equivalent functions for all QuickBooks versions approximately 30 months after it has stopped selling them. In 2009 Intuit also prohibited QuickBooks hosting companies from hosting older QuickBooks versions.
On 15 December 2007, the company released a version of its automatic updater for Mac OS X with a serious program error. The company fixed the updater on 17 December, but by then it had caused substantial data loss for a number of users.
With Quickbooks 2007, the company introduced the Quickbooks Database Server Manager program, which must reside on the computer hosting the data files and which many users have experienced problems with.
QuickBooks Online suffered an extended outage on February 2, 2009, and again due to power failures on June 16–17, 2010. Many customers complained on the company's forum, and threatened to leave the service for a competitor such as Sage. Brad Smith, Intuit CEO, apologized for the series of outages, totaling around 60 hours, which affected most Intuit online products and tech support. A later July 14 outage resulted in a second Intuit CEO apology, which referred to Intuit's "new online products", "designed for 24/7 availability" and to "aggressively migrating" to two new data centers. This suggests that millions of users previously had not been using such programs or data centers, though replicated data centers were industry standard practice by 2004.
A QuickBooks 2009 online banking module had major problems, which resulted in hundreds of comments in several threads on the Intuit Community discussion forum. The QuickBooks product manager used these as an official thread to discuss problems, which were resolved in March 2009.
In 2011, when Intuit started to offer a European QBOE version with UK-specific tax features, users were unable to enroll for a trial period or the full service without a UK credit card.
Read more about this topic: QuickBooks
Famous quotes containing the word criticisms:
“I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments ... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.”
—William James (1842–1910)