hypeway

Microsoft announced its plan to discontinue MS Money, a long-time rivalry to Intuit’s Quicken personal finance software. It’s a little shocking for me to learn the news, since I used to be a MS Money user for a few years. Despite the fact that I had used for Quicken for a long time before I switched to MS Money, I thought MS Money was pretty solid and it’s been keeping Intuit on its toes.

Various articles by CNET and bloggingstocks.com point out that the discontinuation of MS Money comes as a result of cost cutting and growing competition from Quicken, as well as Internet-based Mint.com and Wesabe.

The problem I am seeing is that Microsoft tends to get itself into a game of competing with the leaders instead of being the leader when it comes to innovation. Remember the Web browser war between Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer? The search engine race against Google? The video game console, personal music player, personal finance software, and the list goes on and on. I won’t miss MS Money, since I’ve already switched back to Quicken a while back and have used Mint.com for quite some time. Will the Microsoft Zune end up like MS Money eventually? Only time will tell.