Comments on: Wesabe and Mint: Quicken Killers not Quicken Replacements

By: Anne Z

Anne Z — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 18:09:41 +0000

Travis: how funny you would assume that people have to run spending reports in order to live within their means. Plenty of people have enough income and assets that they don’t need to do that. Not using Quicken doesn’t mean a person is living a “borrowed lifestyle.”

Your IP address indicates you came from Intuit… do you have something to disclose about where you work?

By: Travis

Travis — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 17:56:53 +0000

This is actually a sad commentary on the financial mindset of most people. We don’t care about where the money is going, we only care about how much of it we currently have available.

The advantages in Quicken are for those elite few who actually want to know where the money is going so that a budget can be established to build a savings so that sufficient finances are available. Quicken provides the information necessary to plan, but there will always be a human element necessary to execute the plan. For those who are only interested in how much money is available, then Quicken is probably not for you. If you actually care enough about your finances to know where you are spending too much or too little, and want to budget and plan for a successful financial future, then Quicken is a useful resource.

We need to live within our means and stop living a borrowed lifestyle.

By: David Harper

David Harper — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 20:30:34 +0000

I think Greg is onto something. Like joining the gym after New Years, I keeping buying the latest version of Quicken hoping it will make me a better person…Has anyone done a usability study of quicken, I wonder if it’s like the Bible (or Siebel shelfware): we all bought our copy but only a few do anything with it

But that’s a market that parallels Thikfree, Zoho, EditGrid and the online apps. My take on EditGrid, for example, is not that it steals share away from excel but finds new customers who didn’t want to jump the tall hurdle to crack open Excel. In that way, my quick impression of the potential market is not the heavy (daily visit) users but the I-want-to-use-Quicken-but-its-too-hard people

By: Greg

Greg — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 18:09:33 +0000

I just returned my first-ever copy of Quicken. A piece of bloated crap. You’re right that developing a daily money pit stop is the way too go. Quicken is apparently developing an online version, but given what I’ve seen of their current product, I’m not holding my breath.

By: rick gregory

rick gregory — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 18:08:17 +0000

But… I have a place to check my balances and look at recent transactions. My bank has online banking…

the hard truth of this market is that many of us simply aren’t obsessive about our finances. we don’t care about categorizing our purchases or any of the other things that drive Quicken fans. So the market for these companies is that percentage of the population that IS a bit obsessive about their money - and while Wesabe doesn’t require you to give them access to your account, Mint apparently does. And how many people, with all of the concern about identity theft, are going to say to a small startup “here, have the passwords to my bank accounts and credit cards?”