Intuit: I Have No Confidence in Your Software

You know, there’s nothing worse than buying a piece of software, installing it, starting it up, and having it immediately crash. No splash screen, nothing – it just pukes and gives you an error. I just installed Quickbooks Pro 2007 on my Vista-based laptop, and that’s exactly what it did.

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You’ve gotta’ love the fact that there’s no error information. When I click on VIEW REPORT I see a 500-line XML file that’s completely incomprehensible. Ok, I figured maybe the version out of the box wasn’t Vista-compatible, so I went to their Web site and downloaded the latest update. Installed it, started up the software, same damn error. Rebooted, started up the software, same damn error. It’s interesting to note that there’s no phone number for tech support shown, and no instructions for solving the error – clicking HELP simply gives me information about their reporting policy, nothing to assist me in solving this error.

No wonder some people hate computers – the idiot companies making the software ruin the whole experience. I’ve always thought Quicken products were kind of flaky (I had a Quicken file get corrupted on me last year), but now I know they’re completely flaky.