Intuit Doesn't

Back in the day, the folks at Intuit gave a damn about the user experience, but the people who cared seem to have long left the building. The sorts of things I see in Quicken 2008 or TurboTax just make me shudder. Let me give you a few examples:

• I'm filling out my taxes this year, for the 2008 tax year, and I enter a date, like, say, 4/13. Can you guess what date TurboTax thinks that is? 4/13/08? Ha! It actually thinks you meant April 1, 1913. I kid you not.
• I have my main Quicken file on a server in the basement, and the internal database management is so incredibly bad, after every operation, the entire screen flashes (I mean, every single UI control in the screen) as it redraws, and it puts up a little dialog telling me it's refreshing Quicken data. This is on a machine with several gigs of RAM just waiting to be used.
• While I'm talking about refreshing, I just had to close quicken, because it got into some kind of refresh argument with internet explorer, where each window kept repainting and repainting and repainting and repainting and repainting and repainting. You get the picture.
• My favorite idiocy in quicken is when it's matching up downloaded transactions, and rather than matching a transaction with an uncleared transaction for the exact same date as the downloaded transaction, it'll choose to match it against a cleared transaction for a month prior. I mean, who wrote that code? Sarah Palin?

The sad thing is, from everything I hear, all the other financial management packages suck even worse, so I stick with Quicken, and I stick with TurboTax. But damn!