Nowadays, as the technologies develop so fast, usage of advanced Personal-finance software should have grown to make people manage their money better and easier.
However, since Quicken Software, which Intuit’s Quicken is founded on, no longer contributes 10% to the company’s revenues, Intuit’s Quicken is shifting its resources from its Quicken software to its Web-based Quicken Online. Also, Microsoft, which was a leader in the field of personal-finance software, recently pulled its Money Software from retail channels in favor of online sales only.
Why? There are a couple of reasons.
First, as the article mentioned, market and industry changes are quickly rendering existing products and services obsolete. Set recent finance crisis as an example. The break out of the finance crisis brings great tremendous changes to almost all the markets and industries. It will also certainly bring many influences on people’s money management. Although software companies know that the tools they setup with the software to give advice on people’s investments are turning useless, it is extremely hard to figure out more useful tools, as who knows what will happen in such destructive finance crisis.
Secondly, the technologies applied in the personal-finance software become more and more common. As personal-finance service is still at the early stage of its life cycle and relatively low cost to have related technologies, many companies will try to enter this market. Increasing competition will make personal-finance software less profitable. Actually, Intuit’s Quicken software has become just a landing pad to send customer to more profitable offerings like TurboTax.
Thirdly, few new functions have been generated. When the personal-finance software came up, it really help people, who do not have such tools before, a lot with its basic functions. A decade has passed, although many usability and features were added to the product, few of them seemed useful. It will be a big problem for its product to attract new-use people and maintain payments of former purchaser without significant advancement.
Additionally, recent weak economy cannot be ignored as an important environment factor.
In fact, Intuit’s Quicken is not the only company which is facing this problem, Rudder, Mint, and other personal-finance product providers are in the same situation as Intuit’s Quicken.
But on the other hand, personal-finance software still has some advantages, which developed well will benefit its sales.
Compared to the same kind online services, software will present a more secure-condition in terms of steady operation and safety of password.
Also, it can provide all the available information updated to when you use it online last time when there is no access to Internet. It will become quite useful in some time.
The article is available at http://online.barrons.com/article/SB122488830513468381.html
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1 comment:
As far as I am concerned, the mainly reason for the personal-finance software goes lite is that if this kind of software really have the ability to beat the market, so why the company want to sell the core method to the other people instead of making huge money themselves.
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