Words passed my ears not so long ago that filled my heart with hope. “Have you looked at Quicken Online?”

A prompt buzz of the site showed some promise, much like a pre-psychotic Britney Spears. At a paltry $3/mo, who could argue with that pricing, either? My fond memories of the Quicken application under Windows led me to believe that finally, I could have my Quicken functionality back, but under Linux. Or, for that matter, independent of any operating system.

I was wrong.

You see, the real Quicken application does a mighty number of wonderful deeds, carefully crafted to the exacting specifications that you’ve come to accept from Intuit since the widespread adoption of Quicken in the early nineties. I don’t need to explain to you what the real Quicken does, though. I merely have to show you what the online version does.

In extended detail, what Quicken Online does for you:

1. Downloads your data from your financial institutions
2. Lets you categorize it
3. Puts it in a pie chart

Let’s pretend for a moment that the above is actually useful. What can you do with the above? I’ve come up with some clever ideas.

1. Spend more money in an attempt to make one part of the pie bigger than the other
2. Point out the pie to random people in your office building
3. Pretend that the pie chart is an actual, multi-colored pie
4. Go buy a real pie
5. Tell your friends you’re so utterly independent of Micro$h4ft Winblows that you don’t even need Quicken for Windows, even under WINE support
6. Go to the liquor store and buy some real WINE support
7. Run those damn kids off your lawn

I have to wonder what the development plan was for Quicken Online. Perhaps the business case went a bit like this:

1. Create a quick webapp and call it Quicken Online
2. Market the webapp
3. ???
4. PROFIT!!

I give this application a C for effort, and an F for execution.

Of course, F is for Fail.

-LightningCrash