Intuit Drops Quicken for Macintosh -- Citing declining sales, Intuit has stopped development of Quicken for Macintosh, the popular personal finance package. Intuit plans to continue selling and supporting Quicken 98 for the Macintosh, but Quicken's Macintosh engineers have been re-assigned to Intuit's Internet-based personal finance services. This move comes less than a year and a half after Intuit ceased developing Mac versions of QuickBooks and QuickBooks Pro, its professional accounting and tax software. It also leaves the Mac without personal financial management software, since Quicken dominated the Mac market. Intuit says it will continue to develop MacInTax, its Macintosh-based tax preparation software.

<http://www.intuit.com/support/quicken/ qmnews.html>
<http:/www.quicken.com/>

It's difficult to see how a product with near-total market supremacy can't be worth continued development, although the bundling of Quicken Lite with Performas may have reduced the number of new buyers, and many long-time Quicken users never upgraded to newer versions. Based on email TidBITS has received and comments on other Macintosh news sites, Mac users are extremely concerned about Intuit's move. For more on the topic, check out MacCentral's interview with Intuit's Adam Samuels; further, the Mac Requests Petition Center has begun a Quicken petition. (We reviewed Quicken 98 in "Quicken 98: Evolution at Work" in TidBITS-413.) [GD]

<http://www.maccentral.com/news/9804/ 19.quicken.shtml>
<http://mac.prohosting.com/petition.html>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/04651>