My grandmother had a Filco refrigerator in her basement that she purchased in 1946. When she passed away in 2017 that refrigerator was still operating. Since 1946, innovations have improved energy efficiency, refrigerator capacity, and numerous other features we enjoy, but those innovations have all come at the cost of product quality. That old fridge continued to keep frozen food frozen, and cold foods cold for over 71 years. We sold it. I expect that it is still operating today.
I suspect that, these days, companies fear their product living too long a lifespan. Compare Coca Cola to Filco. Coke makes a product that you can buy today, and then buy again tomorrow, the next day, and so on. Filco made a product that you only had to buy once a century or so. At some point, people figured out the double bonus effect of making lower quality products. First, they get the benefit of lower upfront costs per unit, since the lower quality product is made from cheaper parts. And second, the lower quality parts act as timebombs, shortening the product lifespan, and increasing the frequency of which consumers will have to return to the market for an "updated" product.
QuickBooks doesn't have to worry so much about the quality aspect; the products they sold us function the way we wanted them to. I mean, who among us here REALLY NEEDS a different, updated accounting software product to meet our needs? I would argue, very few, if any of us. Our desktop software does everything we need it to do. And, because of the nature of business administration, our accounting needs aren’t going to change anytime soon. So, This software, in and of itself, could serve us for the next twenty years, or for the foreseeable future, without needing much in the way of updates. That means there is no intrinsic timebomb in the quality of the product. Instead, Intuit believes it necessary to IMPOSE an ARTIFICIAL TIMEBOMB in the product in order to stimulate a continual flow of repeat purchasers. They’ve experimented with the customer base, trying to find that sweet spot where the customers would bear the cost of the upgrade without rebelling against the company. Three years seemed to work for a while. Then, they saw Microsoft taking its Office products and switching them over to a Software As Service (SAS) subscription based model, pumping money in on a regular basis rather than every so many years. Honestly, I was fine with Microsoft Word 2007 (because it was the first to save files in .pdf format). Adobe jumped on board. SAS became all the rage. Now, Intuit says, “We want some of that.”
Meanwhile, Intuit’s customer base already has QuickBooks products that serve the customer’s needs. We don’t need anything more, we don’t need anything new. We don’t need upgrades, bells, whistles, or BS. When a new version of TurboTax comes out, we just need it to have the capacity to do what it’s been doing for the past several years. Why not just continue to support the QuickBooks you already sold me, and I, as a loyal customer, will continue to purchase your updated TurboTax? I can understand TurboTax needing to be new each year. That makes sense. The federal government changes the tax laws every year, so the tax software must change. No problem here. You can have my money on that every year happily and without complaint. But my accounting software doesn’t need anywhere near that kind of attention.
Intuit is turning QuickBooks into a hamster wheel, and turning its customers into hamsters. That’s not a healthy relationship. They still have the opportunity to do better. Will they take that opportunity, or will they run the company on hamster power?
