Stories about: Intuit

Intuit is trying to win users at the expense of its rival The Sage Group.

Adobe Systems, whose roots are in the media and publishing industries, is pushing deeper into the enterprise by promoting its Flash platform as a way to improve the stodgy user interfaces that come with most business applications.

Microsoft won't update its Money Plus personal finance software, as it has annually for 17 years, and has pulled the program from retail, saying it will now distribute it only electronically, according to postings on the company's support forum.

Security software customers are speaking with their feet: They want security updates and other security interruptions out of their faces, and they won't hesitate to dump their security suites because of performance drag -- whether or not it's actually the security software that's to blame.

Microsoft has released an update to Windows Home Server that fixes a data-corruption problem some users were having with the software.

Bill Gates retired from Microsoft a decade ago, yet his ghost still loomed large, in the form of a persistent effort to continually extend the reach of Microsoft into every nook and cranny possible. And that ghost inhabited a company increasingly focused inward on its own view of what users should want and do. Like Windows Vista and Windows 7 before it, Windows UT (Unlimited Technology) captured a smaller share of upgrades than its predecessor. Ditto with Office UT. Even though Microsoft paid attention to hardware resource requirements in UT and didn't wield the new software as a way to force users to buy new hardware as its last several versions had done, feature fatigue had set in. For most people, Office 2000 and Windows XP did the job they needed, and learning a new UI every few years was simply not in the cards for a user base that had long thought of technology not as a shiny toy to play with but instead as a tool that needed to get the job done and stay out of the way.

There are many popular, low-cost ways to toss text onto the Web, from blogs and Google Docs to social networking sites. Likewise, you can find a lot of sites where you can post photos and videos. But until recently, less attention has been paid to online databases -- and that's a pity, because lots of people besides database geeks would benefit from a bit more structure to their data.

Managers are looking more closely at hosted business applications as the number of unfinished IT projects grows, skilled workers become increasingly scarce, and upgrade and maintenance costs skyrocket.