Dear Valued Customer:

In response to your comments on the implementation of product activation technology in tax year 2002 TurboTax(R) software, I wanted to let you know that Intuit will discontinue product activation in next year's TurboTax desktop products purchased at retail or direct from Intuit.

We are absolutely committed to listening and learning from our customers. We clearly need to better understand all of our customers' tax preparation needs and how they use TurboTax.

While we remain committed to protecting our intellectual property, going forward, we will only introduce digital rights management technologies that maximize customer experience and preserve customer satisfaction.

Again, thanks for your feedback.

Regards,
Tom Allanson, Sr. Vice President
TurboTax

"Won't be buying it ever again!", Let me first start by saying I have been using Turbo Tax for 4 years now. This year Intuit made some significant changes which, unfortunately, are a disservice to its customers. First, you need to "activate" this product before you can do things like file electronically or even print your form. Once you install this on a particular computer you can forget about installing it on another one such as your laptop since the product is now tied to ONE computer for ALL time! So much for trusting your long-time, loyal customers. I was dismayed to find I was essentially forced to register my product. Secondly, most customers will be unpleasantly surprised to find you are blasted with advertisements from financial institutions WHILE using the software! That's right, you are in the middle of answering questions regarding your financial history and when you get to topics such as investing you are besieged with "relevant" ads. This is totally unacceptable! After paying ... retail for this product the last thing a customer wants is advertisements plastered in his face, especially right in the middle of doing your calculations. I can imagine using MS Word in the the not to distant future and the "little paper clip" pops up and tells me to go buy Webster's dictionary after I run the spell checker. Yeah right, only Intuit could think their customers are this naive.
In conclusion, the quality of this product has been diminished because of Intuit's attempts to squeeze at little more revenue out of this program. It appears as though these attempts have back-fired. After speaking with several colleages of mine they informed me they switched this year to Tax Cut. Next year I will do the same.

"This was a good product until this year", My computer "crashed" and I had to install my HDD and other peripherals in a new case with a P-4 motherboard.
Intuit no longer recognizes my installation as valid, I never got the State edition and the copy will not print out my forms.
Intuit's only solution is to purchase this package all over again.

No way will I purchase this again. I will copy and paste the info into the IRS.gov forms to print the final forms...or import the info into TaxAct and then ask for my mony back.

Intit has lost a faithul small business customer.

R. S. Davis, P.E.

"Terrible product, crippled with "activation"", I've used TurboTax products for the last several years, but unfortunately, I'll probably never ever buy one again. First of all, the product is crippled with "activation". Someone at intuit is probably being touted as a genius for increasing revenue by 0.01% with this new copy protection. Unfortunately for him, he'll probably get laid off next year when the company enters bankruptcy because their customer base will not be coming back. The "activation" protection only lets you print and file form one computer. This is a terrible inconvenience for me as I have two computers, one in the den and one in the bedroom. I installed into the den, so if I try to use the software on the bedroom computer late at night, it comes up in demo mode and nags me to buy the software. Honest to god -- something I paid [money] for nags me and treats me like I pirated the software. For that reason alone I'll never buy another intuit product. As if activation is not enough of a problem, the software is bug-ridden to the point of being virtually unusable. The first time I tried to do my taxes it corrupted the save file when I finished working on it. This caused the program to crash with a "error in kernel32.dll" every time I loaded it from then on -- couldn't even load the program. The only fix was to delete my taxes and start all over again. There's also numerous other bugs. When I imported my tax info from 2001, it created some phantom nonexistant W2 that confused the heck out of everything. It often fails the tax return verification check at the end of the process because the interview procedure fails to ask some question that's needed to fill in some obscure worksheet that isn't even needed with your taxes. In conclusion, the only reason I purchased this software was because I was a loyal TurboTax user of years past, and they're certainly ruined that. I'll never buy this product again.

I found a blatent bug in their Web product that was miscalculating a basic number regarding mortgage interest, which I suspect had something to do with the Schedule C information.

Their tech support could not even support the Web product. They could not help me in the least bit. Incidentally, getting tech support was a joke! There were no free options. I couldn't even look at a knowledge base.

"They've lost a customer.", I've filed my returns using TurboTax since 1998. This year, I hesitated after hearing about the c-dilla controversy, but decided to stick with a proven product.

After installing the software and partially completing my return, my Norton Internet Security firewall would not allow me to access any web sites. I contacted Intuit's online chat customer service, after disabling my firewall. The service agent, who was at least polite, could offer me nothing better than "Turbotax is not compatible with firewalls." I tried to explain several times that it didn't matter whether the product was running or not: Ever since I installed Turbotax my firewall blocked all internet traffic. Nothing got through. I followed their instructions to uninstall the product, but balked when told to restart my computer in safe mode and install the software again. I couldn't get an answer to why that would help me, so I gave up. I tried the online chat again in hopes of finding another, more knowledgeable agent. No dice. When I tried to escalate to a manager, the agent signed me off. After another escalation attempt, the online help finally gave me a PIN number to use when I called their long distance help line. The agent on the help line could only recommend I call Symantec.

Because we rely on internet access for researching homework problems, I uninstalled and then reinstalled my firewall so that my computer could access the internet.

A day later, after cooling off, I contacted the for-charge help line again, and got another agent to help me. She told me to stop my firewall and antivirus, then install TurboTax. Since I did that, I've been able to run TurboTax and my firewall concurrently.

The whole series of events makes me wonder what I get for paying Intuit over [$$$]. Their help system stinks, and their arrogance regarding software licensing controls has made their product suspect in my mind. By forcing me to fool around with my firewall installation, they've put me in a very uncomfortable position.

I guess I'll complete my return and then fully uninstall Turbotax and my firewall, then install the firewall again. I'll probably start using TaxCut next year.

"Use TaxCut instead!", TurboTax has performed well in the past, but this year it has failed to perform at an acceptable level. The new TurboTax requires online activation. It also tries to limit software sharing and in doing so makes file storage, back-up and retrieval difficult. I have been unable to re-open my work because of these protections and have had to start completely over on a long return. TurboTax also seems a bit less user-friendly this year. I have had to abondon TurboTax because of these problems and am now using TaxCut instead.
Save a lot of trouble and start with TaxCut instead!