I awoke groggily and with blurred vision, grabbing my MacBook Pro and sitting down to wake up to the ding of new mail this morning. What did I find? Google Alerts telling me that what I feared was going to happen had happened. Intuit is taking Quicken online as a service rather than as a program.

Why was this something I feared? Because I’ve used Quicken on the Mac since version 7 back in the late 90s. I, personally, have years of data inside it. As a customer, I’m seeing the writing on the wall for the product.

As I related once before on my personal site, this has been rumored for quite a while so the actual service is not a surprise. What it means for the users of desktop Quicken is the surprise.

While at WWDC these past two years I paid special attention to the questions the Intuit guys were asking and their frustrations with Apple, the tools, and what they had to work with. It was enlightening.

While in the 64-bit session, one Intuit fellow went up and asked if any of the 64-bit material would be available outside of Xcode or for Carbon users. He was told no. He then went slightly off-kilter and started on about how he has a 15-year old project stuck in Code Warrior and a PEF executable format that he can’t really update the core of and has no way of porting it to Xcode easily. The Apple guys shrugged.

Which is what Apple’s done, in general, to Quicken. It’s no longer bundled with new Macs because (as I understand it) it’s not Universal. And it won’t be Universal until they move to Xcode. And they can’t move to Xcode without manpower that Intuit is apparently reluctant to give them. That’s were Quicken for the Web seemingly comes in.

“Intuit is currently planning for 2008 Quicken offerings and is investigating the best possible ways to serve the entire Quicken community. With anticipation of the launch of the new Mac OS X (Leopard) and Intuit’s ongoing focus on delivering customer driven innovation, more information around future Mac offerings will be shared at a later time.” MacNN | Intuit speaks on Quicken 2008 Mac, Leopard

Serve the entire Quicken community. That’s code for a solution that works on all platforms. That’s code for a web service. That’s Intuit refusing to commit to a new Mac version of Quicken.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s not the same as not doing a Quicken 2008, but even if they did such a thing, we as users have no reason to expect anything great out of it. The program itself hasn’t fundamentally changed since 1997. Have you noticed how .Mac support was added to Quicken? It calls an external program to handle everything with .Mac. Why? Because it’s a much older format project and can’t use Apple’s DotMacKit directly, so they wrote a Cocoa program (it appears) that handles the .Mac interaction and the only thing they had to do in Quicken was start an external program with arguments and be told to open files. It’s a hack.

I don’t begrudge the Intuit guys for this; they have a lot of old code to deal with and obviously haven’t been given the manpower to clean it up as they needed to. But when Intuit walks out and says they won’t talk about future Mac offerings just yet and then roll out a web service, well, color me suspicious. A think a move of this kind is a natural progression for a company of Intuit’s cluelessness. With all of the Internet security breaches in the past decade, I’m sure tons of people are just standing at the door and screaming to put their entire financial history and status on a third-party company’s server.

I’d love to be wrong. Mainly because I’d love to have real competition to Prosperity, but also because having Intuit on-board is a sign the Mac is healthy, and that Intuit is healthy. Missing out on that just looks bad to switchers.

Well, the good news is that we’re working on something to ease this in the coming year or so. We put out a release last week and are putting out the first program today to testers. We hope to have something in January for the rest of the world. I think we can help fill the void of good desktop finance programs for the Mac in the coming year, and from the looks of it, we’re going to need to.