Nontrivial Exercises

The DRM-Like Bondage of Financial Software

There’s more and more talk lately about Digital Rights Management, or DRM for media content - how cumbersome it is, how it seemingly just penalizes the honest people who aren’t trying to violate copyrights, how it creates bigger and bigger obstacle between you and your music or video.

There is another area, however, outside of music and video where we experience an even greater lack of portability of our data - personal financial software. I’m talking about the Big 2 personal finance software packages, Quicken and Microsoft Money.

If you thought it was difficult to figure out how to get your purchased music back from iTunes after you just wiped your hard drive, or if you think the Windows Media Player 11’s non-backup DRM solution sounds crazy, just look at how much fun you could have trying to switch from one finance application to another.

About 2 years ago I purchased Microsoft Money 2006. I had used Quicken in the past, but wasn’t using it at the time, and simply wanted to try an alternative. I was actually using gnucash, an open source alternative to the Big 2, which actually has some really nice features. However, it wasn’t quite up to the level of what I needed and wanted to do.

I read positive reviews about MS Money and decided to give it a try. I’ve actually been pretty impressed with it and have found it to be fairly useful. I have of course put all my info and quite a bit of history from all my accounts into my MS Money database - all stuff I want to keep.

When I fired up my new MacBook in May, I saw that Quicken came bundled with OS X 10.4. I had been (and still now am) continuing to use MS Money in Windows via Parallels, but I would really like to be able to use my finance software as a native Mac application. So, I sat down one day to see if I could transfer my MS Money data (from a PC) into Quicken (on a Mac).

A quick look on the Quicken support pages showed me there is absolutely no way to directly import MS Money data into Quicken for a Mac. However, Intuit does talk about how to import / convert MS Money to Quicken for Windows. I of course didn’t have Quicken for Windows and wasn’t about to go purchase it just to try this conversion out. Intuit doesn’t offer a free temporary or limited version of Quicken for the purpose of conversion, so I was basically out of luck.

I actually have a friend who works for Intuit and I talked with him about my dilemma. He actually helped me get Quicken 2007 for PC for me - completely legally of course - in hopes I could use it to first convert data from MS Money to Quicken for PC, then from Quicken PC to Quicken Mac.

It turns out that MS Money can only export to a QIF file format , which only handles a limited amount of your full transaction data. Further, you have to export account-by-account to individual QIF files, then import them to Quicken. Further, since the QIF format is pretty rudimentary, a lot of your data isn’t transferred (scheduled transactions, loan setups, online payee setups, etc.). Further, Quicken 2007 has fully removed support for QIF import, since it’s such a basic format.

[Note: I submitted a support request to Intuit about conversion and they actually did provide a workaround that enables QIF importing for Quicken 2007. It's a password-protected hack you have to download from Intuit, but presumably they will offer it to you upon request. But, QIF export and import doesn't solve the problem of extracting and transferring all your data from one program to another.]

Talk about your data being held captive by an application! Once you have setup MS Money or Quicken with all your data and entered all your transaction histories, setup all your scheduled transactions, all your loans and online credentials, all your categories and reminders - there’s literally no way of getting it all out of that application and into another one.

The difference between not being able to backup your Windows Media Player 11 music at all, or renting your music, or not being able to re-download your already-purchased music from iTunes (and a whole host of other DRM headaches) and being locked in to Quicken or MS Money once you start is significant. With media, you own a licensed copy of someone else’s work. You buy the permission to consume that work over and over again.

With your financial data, it’s actually your data that you created and that pertains only to you. There’s no license, no copyright, no external entity involved in creation or delivery of the data. It’s simply your financial data that you can’t extract to move to another management system.

What a mess this is. I literally cannot move to Quicken from MS Money because I can’t get all my data to move from one app to another. It’s my data, created by me, and I can’t get it out of that application and into another one.

And the blame spreads around equally. Quicken doesn’t play very nice with others either. Of course Intuit and Microsoft want their apps to be as sticky as possible to the end user, and they don’t want it to be easy to leave their app for the competition. Just like the U.S. cellphone operators initially fought against Local Number Portability, Microsoft and Intuit are not at all interested in making their products easy to change away from.

And hopefully, just as with Local Number Portability, the end user consumer purchaser of the service will eventually win the right to take his or her data with them wherever they want to go.

Wouldn’t you rather have your customers stay with your product or service because you give them the best quality, the best support, the best value and the best relationship vs. the competition … rather then because there’s no way anyone without a PhD, hours of free time and a padded room with no hard, blunt objects around could extract all their data from your product to move to the competition?