February 18, 2003
intuit sucks
I’ve been a loyal Intuit customer, purchasing TurboTax every year for the past three years. They created a good product at a fair price that just plain worked and I rewarded them for it. Next year, I’m going to find another way to do my taxes.
My first grievance: I used TurboTax for the Web last year, and at the end of the process, saved the .tax file it created. When I tried to import it into this year’s return, I found out that the web version of the file is incompatible with the Windows standalone version. What crappy engineering is this, that they can’t make a single document format work across all versions of a product?
My second grievance: I tried to get help for this on the web. After wrestling with the troubleshooter, I decided to try and “chat” with a “live agent”. After connecting with the “agent”, I tried explaining my problem. The slow reaction time, canned responses, and non sequiters the agent responded with made me annoyed and suspicious that I wasn’t talking to a human at all, but to an AI chatbot of some sort. I disconnected from the first agent and tried “speaking” with a second agent. Although the canned responses were slightly different, they followed the same pattern as the previous agent’s responses. I asked this one point blank if it was a human, and it didn’t respond for 4 minutes. I asked it some more questions, and then asked it if it was a human again, and got a terse “yes” in response.
Well, let me tell you something, Intuit — I don’t fucking think so. You may have some decent programmers, but they can’t write AI bots that pass a Turing test yet.
Now normally, this sort of thing would appeal to my geeky side. But as a paying customer who is trying to get support for a product, being told that I’m connected with a “live agent” when in reality I’m chatting with a bot is pretty misleading.
My third grievance: TurboTax installs a nasty piece of software written by Macrovision (the same folks who invented VHS and DVD piracy safeguards) called SafeCast or C-Dilla. The thing is, they don’t tell you that you’re getting a bonus piece of crapware installed on your machine that stays resident in memory and messes with your system. My laptop has never hung once before installing TurboTax, but mysteriously started hanging and acting sluggishly afterwards. I uninstalled both TurboTax and C-Dilla and no more hangs. You tell me what the problem was.
Here’s some stuff on the web:
- “live agent” — see if it passes your own Turing test
- In depth explanation of what C-Dilla does (it writes to reserved sectors of your hard drive, in case you were curious)
- C-Dilla uninstaller
- Should you use TurboTax?
- online reputation management — an interesting article written by Nicholas Carroll. Perhaps if a meme about how Intuit sucks were to spread across the internet, it would make the company respect their customers more.
February 26th, 2003 at 12:41 am
Two interesting notes regarding the “live chat”:
1) The link has changed slightly since you made this entry - the capitalization is now different.
http://www3.turbotaxsupport.com/contactoptions.asp?usedPortal=True
2) I don’t know if this was true when you used the live chat, but right now they are calling it “Paid Internet Chat Support” and it costs $4.95 per incident. If what you said about the bot is even remotely true, this might actually be illegal - once you are selling a product, you are subject to false advertising laws. Then again, they say you are communicating with a live “agent”.
April 15th, 2003 at 10:52 pm
TURBOTAX - NEVER AGAIN
BUYERS BEWARE IN 2003
NASTY HIDDEN FEATURES
December 2nd, 2003 at 8:07 pm
Had a similar problem with Q2004.
Tried to download it from their website and it would never open.
Called tech support chat line and they said it was a sales problem.
Sales said to un-install and re-install.
DING!
It un-installs great but re-install?
Fugggeddaaboudit!
Three days and four hours on the phone/chat line later & here is Their Solution.
1. Purchase ANOTHER download
2. Try again.
3. Intuit will refund for the first download.
4. Well, was born at night but not last night.
5. I told them that I did not consider this a viable option.
Option B was to send me a disk at a charge of $5.95
Again nothin’ doin’
Option C give me my money back.
“We must inform you that any data you have will be lost”
Sez I, What data? The damn thing never opened. Don’t you people understand English?
Oh, that’s right, no they don’t.
Noone to bitch to either.
Hope the cocksuckers can understand my English.
December 19th, 2003 at 12:19 pm
I’ve been a QUICKEN user for years. Love their stuff. Well, not anymore. 2001 Deluxe started-out ok, but checks won’t line-up properly, the date won’t print on the check, you can no-longer print the address on the check if it is created in the register… all kinds of little things that I don’t like. I call for support, they want a credit card number. I mention their defective software, I get nowhere. I’ve reinstalled multiple times, I have the latest service packs. I do this computer stuff for a living, like 25+ years. I’m no idiot. All I want is a version that works. BUT, I will not pay them one cent for any of their products or support. Intuit doesn’t care about me, the customer. I downloaded a free trial of Microsoft Money. I don’t like Microsoft either, but what are my choices?
January 17th, 2004 at 9:05 pm
Intuit went from a promising tax program provider to some kind of suck - ass peice of shit.
I chatted about my problems importing and got bullshit - any one else having problems importing from QUICKEN?
I’m giving them one week to fix this thing or contet the charge on my credit card. I’m looking to join forces with others like us and see if we can get this resolved - Intuit sucks so bad I’m willing to pay Bill Gates for MS MOney to get out from under the Intuit bastards!
August 27th, 2004 at 9:18 pm
if you buy taxcut (h&r block’s income tax product, and direct competitor w/intuit’s turbotax), you get a coupon for full rebate to buy ms money…..
in this way you can give intuit what they have been giving their customers for the last few years: the bone.
the only thing they will respond to is their bottom line being hurt, so you know what to do–don’t buy their products!
March 18th, 2005 at 9:47 am
Intuit Rocks!
October 31st, 2006 at 6:40 pm
The Coalition of Asian Pacific Americans is asking consumers to stop buying Quicken software and other products made by Intuit in response to the company’s attempt to buy an election away John Chiang.
CAPA is asking people to send pledges to boycott Intuit products via email or fax to co-founder and executive committee chairman Scott Cook, president and CEO Steve Bennett and chairman Bill Campbell. Their email addresses and phone numbers are listed on our blog at blog.capaweb.org.
“Boycott new purchases of Quicken, QuickBooks and TurboTax if you’re against blatantly buying candidates to increase corporate wealth,” said Dale Minami, president of CAPA.
March 18th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
I completely with all of these and many other sentiments/comments regarding Intuit. I’ve been using their products since the 80s, and have they become a big fucking tank of shit! Just yet another stupid ass fucking company full of monster ego managers and overworked programmers. No fucking support whatsoever, extremely high-priced crappy products, with frequent “NEW” versions which cost hundreds of dollars for NOTHING or for BUG FIXES which THEY should fix. Fucking assholes…I fucking HATE them!
January 10th, 2008 at 11:19 am
I’ve been buying updates to Quicken (and occasionally Quickbooks for my company) since late 1990’s. I just experienced the autobot fiasco described above and attach the transcript below.
I’ve had similar results when trying to configure Direct Connect between Quickbooks and Quickbooks MasterCard (I gave up after 3hrs on various phone calls). Quicken has increasing numbers of glitches in their investment widget (e.g. P/E ratios and other statistics are wildly wrong). But problems could be overlooked if they were more responsive in customer service…but it’s not. I’m off to look for alternatives.
Transcript with live agent:
Neelam Sharma: Welcome to Quicken chat support. My name is Neelam Sharma. Please give me a moment while I review the info you provided.
R: Did uninstall from Windows Control Panel before reinstalling Quicken 2008 Home & Business.
Neelam Sharma: Thank you for the information
Neelam Sharma: May I know your name please?
R: why
Neelam Sharma: So you are not able to install Quicken . Right?
R: yes
Neelam Sharma: R, may I know which operating system are you using?
R: xp pro
Neelam Sharma: ok
Neelam Sharma: May I know the exact error message or code?
R: do you want the crash.xml and crash.dmp files? if so, how to get them to you?
R: error code 7051
Neelam Sharma: Oh I see.
Neelam Sharma: Do you have CD?
R: I sent error report electronically (again). Dialog responds “Your report ID is 10470026″
R: I’m loading off an ISO I keep on my HDD since Quicken often needs reinstall (similar problem on updates causing patching error which requires complete reinstall…this time the reinstall doesn’t work either).
R: I have the CD too…
R: hello?
Neelam Sharma Has Disconnected
May 15th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
This is a greeat thread, thank you for starting it AND keeping it going. I know just above nothing on websites but I was angry enough over their stinking non-transferrable licnese stuff that I created rippedoffbyintuit.com and ihateit.com. If anyone wants to help with these….
I posted a link to this site.