QuickBooks2006 incompatible with Vista!?

I am amazed and dismayed.

I just received email "signed" by Mr. Brad Smith, Senior Vice-President of QuickBooks indicating that QuickBooks 2006 would not be compatible with Microsoft Vista. Let me see if I can be more precise; Mr. Smith says:

If you choose to upgrade to Windows Vista

We recommend that you use QuickBooks 2007 (and Point of Sale v6.0, if applicable). QuickBooks 2007 is the only version of the software built to run on the new Windows Vista operating system.

Again, we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. If you would like to send us feedback on QuickBooks and Windows Vista, please visit our Windows Vista Resource Center at www.quickbooks.com/support/vista.

Huh? Apologize for "any inconvenience"??? QuickBooks (Intuit) should be begging its users to stick with QuickBooks... in spite of the difficulty that Windows Vista will ultimately cause them. They should be actively berating Microsoft for creating such headaches for them and their customer base.

Intuit should be shipping upgrades to their QuickBooks 2006 product that make it compatible with Vista (while remaining compatible with existing versions of Windows)... at no charge. This is how a company that values it customers (and is concerned about them leaving) behaves.

Instead, we (paid customers) get a letter announcing the "inconvenience" of a forced upgrade to QuickBooks 2007 (Pro goes for $179.95- there appears to be no upgrade pricing - this is essentially the price I paid for QuickBooks 2006... on year ago).

(Never mind that QuickBooks (even "Pro") is constantly badgering me about signing up for this or that for-money service from Inuit... be it PayRoll, accepting credit-cards, or what have you).

Waitwaitwait... why would Intuit take a stand here? They have 87% market-share (a whopping $750,000,000 in 2005) in this area... and so... why wouldn't they demand their users pay another tax to stay with their product? After all, that's precisely what Microsoft is doing with Vista...

Don't get me wrong: I'm not in any great hurry to upgrade to Vista... but I know there will come a time in the not-so-distant future when new computers will ship only with Vista... and unless I have an IT department that would qualify me as a company big enough to run "real" accounting software, I'll have a hard time downgrading to an XP installation on such machines.

It's time for the customers of Intuit to band together and seek an alternate solution. Establish a plan, and knock that 87% in half for 2007. That should deliver a clear message to Mr Smith. The attitude and language of this forced-upgrade announcement are outrageous.

If you have any interest in migrating away from QuickBooks, please drop a note here. If you know of an alternative for very small businesses, please say so... and say why you like the product. Thanks.

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