Is Q approaching end-of-life?

skeleton567

I see that Quicken was first created and released in 1983, just three years before I began digitizing my financial data and stopped depending on paper records. At that point I had been working with digital data for about 14 years. In those times, personal applications were fairly rare, with development focused heavily on business and industrial use.

My first memories of Q are of a simple application in which I could enter and manage my data in a straight-forward manner.

I have enjoyed a career spanning 56 years of using digital technology and 42 years actually in IT developing digital systems.

My first project developing systems to actually collect digital data without internal human processing involved the use of the old Telxon units at a distribution company in the mid-seventies. All the user had to do was dial a number and the electronics did the rest. With roughly 45 sales personnel using the devices, data errors that required human intervention were rare, maybe two or three errors a month system-wide mostly due to bad phone connections that were corrected by dialing in again. The device only had to be smart enough to do a check-digit calculation on account numbers and product numbers.

My assessment of the Q situation is that in order to survive with success, Q actually needs to be divided into two independent parts, one for the financial institution and one for the end-user.

On the FI end, there would be a simple parameter-driven application BY QUICKEN triggered by an incoming request which the FI would feed from their systems which would VALIDATE TO QUICKEN STANDARDS the requested data BEFORE it is transmitted. If it fails, it notifies THE FINANCIAL INSTITUTION of the failure and WHAT CAUSED THE FAILURE (exact record, exact data element, exact cause), Once VALIDATED, the data is then and then only transmitted to the end-user.

For the end-user, the data is received and saved on the user system. This saved data is then before ANY updating, VALIDATED against the end-user's data and failures are reported IN DETAIL (again exact record, exact data element, exact cause) to the user.

Only when the transmitted data is totally VALIDATED is it used to update the user data.

If we could do this successfully forty years ago, I'm fairly certain it could be done today. And Quicken might avoid its looming demise. Quicken support would have very little to do because their product would be smart enough to have the FI and the end user solving their own problems.