As of today June 30, and 17 years after launching Money Plus, Microsoft is no longer selling its personal finance software programs. Â Microsoft stopped providing updates and selling boxed versions of the product in retail stores (providing only online downloads) as of August 2008, as we mentioned at the time. The reason given now for the decision to discontinue Money Plus is that banks and financial institutions currently offer similar services to their users and free online personal finance services such as Mint.com are becoming ever more popular. But Microsoft could also no longer compete with Intuit’s Quicken, currently the leading provider of personal finance software.
Microsoft has been cutting costs for some time, phasing out about 13 other software and web services in the last eight months, including the Encarta encyclopedia, Dynamics Entrepreneur, Office Accounting, Digital Image Suite and the Windows OneCare antivirus product. The Microsoft Office and Windows products continue to bring strong sales, and they will maintain their MSN Money website which provides personal finance advice as well as market news and quotes.
Microsoft will continue to provide support for Money Plus until Jan. 31, 2011. The programs’ online services will expire two years after initial activation for Money Plus Deluxe, Premium and Home & Business versions (one year after initial activation for Money Plus Essentials) or Jan. 31, 2011, whichever comes first. After that time, users can continue to use the product indefinitely, however related online services such as online banking, online quotes, yearly tax updates or bill payment will no longer be provided. Users will need to manually download transactions and update tax rates using rate schedules from the IRS website. Consumers who have already bought the program but not installed it yet should do so before January 31, 2011. For more information, refer to Microsoft’s FAQ page at http://www.microsoft.com/money/faq.mspx.
For those users wishing to switch to Quicken, at the moment up to 10,000 transactions can be imported from Microsoft Money. For those users with data in excess of that amount, Microsoft will work with Quicken to develop a new free file conversion tool to convert the data from Microsoft’s format to Quicken’s. The tool will hopefully be ready before the next release of Quicken this fall. Quicken are currently offering discounts of $20 on Deluxe and $30 on both Premier and Home & Business as well as free bonus software such as WillMaker 2009, Quicken Educated Investor WealthBuilder and Quicken Legal Business Pro.
