No, there won't ever be a Money(next)…
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Overview

I have long chronicled, here and in the newsgroup, my sense of the business case issues driving a declining long term outlook for Microsoft’s commitment to its Money personal financial management application. I did this based on external evidence available at the time. See "When, if ever, will we see Money(next)?" for the most recent missive on the subject posted here. Over the years, some people thought I was just being an apologist for some of Microsoft’s product design decisions or shilling for them. Others thought I was nuts in my assessments of how Microsoft’s costs likely were comparing with their revenues. I take no joy in feeling vindicated by what has happened. Now, as they say, “it is what it is”. We must deal with it and get on with our lives.

On Wednesday, June 10, 2009, Microsoft announced their intention to quit selling the Money application and to discontinue online services associated with it. While there are currently many rumors and much hope that there may be a change of heart, or somebody will buy the code from Microsoft, or a miracle converter to Quicken will be released, or Microsoft will see fit to provide better support to users than they’ve presently committed, or who knows what may happen in the future, users must make plans and decisions and prepare for a future based on what is known today. Some of these things may require immediate tactical actions; others are strategic long term items. Let’s consider the issues with heavy emphasis on impacts to Money Plus (M+) users.

What will happen and when will it happen?

Microsoft will stop selling new M+ licenses and associated activation keys on June 30, 2009. This will have no impact on existing users or their data or the online services they use via Money. But don’t ignore this date—it may prove important to you as noted below.

Microsoft will discontinue all online services provided uniquely by or via Money on January 31, 2011. This will have no impact on the data you have stored in a working Money installation. It will eliminate a number of things including: “Internet Updates” including patches, stock quotes, “via third party” downloaded transaction data, and, perhaps strategically most important, application Activation.

At some point beyond this, the WindowsLive ID interface used by Money, if enabled by the user to authenticate user access to their data file and to the “via third party” transaction data downloads, will probably be discontinued or broken. At this point, a working Money installation would no longer be able to authenticate you and allow you access to your data file.

What issues must users deal with?

Fundamentally, all the issues associated with Microsoft’s abandonment of Money come down to just two areas of concern:

Data protection – what must users do to preserve the data they’ve already collected in Money?

Maintenance of capability – what options do users have to continue to meet functional objectives they use Money to satisfy today?

Data Protection

Many of us have almost twenty years of the entire financial history of our lives in our Money data files. Worse, for many of us it’s the sole source of this history. For this reason, it is vital for Money users to consider what they must do to preserve access to this information and to weight the efforts they feel necessary against the amount of value they place on this information.

First, let’s define some terms:

Not activated – a copy of M+ that is not activated only allows read access to data files after ninety days from installation

Activated – a copy of M+ installed and activated, not later than January 31, 2011, with an available application key.

Expired – a copy of M+ that has been activated and provided its entire term (two years from activation or, now, January 31, 2011, whichever comes first). Expired copies of M+ will not have Microsoft-provided online service.

Existing activated Money installations will continue to provide access to existing data in your Money data files for as long as the installation (computer hardware, OS, etc.) continues to function—provided you remove WinLive/Passport authentication at some point before that service breaks. If you believe that your existing installation of Money will work without fail for as long as you need to access the information already in your Money data file, then you needn’t anything driven by Microsoft’s announcement.

If, on the other hand, you plan on buying a new computer or reinstalling the operating system on your existing system or your hard disk is getting a little long in the tooth, there are issues to consider.

No new Money Plus sales after June 30, 2009: You will not be able to buy new activation keys or download the installable file after this date. If you do not have any keys available for activating Money Plus, you will not be able to create a new installation that will work for anything besides reading your data file.

No Money Plus activation after January 31, 2011: Any installation of Money Plus after this date will not activate even if you have keys.

The short form: you need to take action NOW to assure that you have what you consider to be sufficient available activation keys (typically each purchase will activate on two different platforms, IIRC) for any installation you plan between now and January 31, 2011. This may mean you need to spend more money, yet this month, with Microsoft on the Money product, even though it may be painful or annoying to have to do so. And you must use these keys to activate any M+ installations you feel you will need—forever—by January 31, 2011. Yes, there are many efforts to convince Microsoft of the error of their ways and of their moral and ethical obligation to provide a DRM free installable for M+ prior to termination of activation services. But there is no assurance this will happen so assume it will happen at your own risk.

(It ought to be unnecessary to state the obvious: you need to protect the installable file and your activation keys with backups or having purchased them will have done you no good. I know this should be obvious but all too many users just don’t get it. After June 30, 2009, you will no longer be able to obtain the installable via “legitimate” distribution channels.)

Loss of Internet Updates after January 31, 2011: Activated and unexpired installations will not be able to get the patch updates after this point. For M+ users, this is probably not a big deal as there have only been two and they didn’t fix much of consequence. But you might want to be sure and save a backup of the MNYCoreFiles folder just in case. But M05 users, who otherwise may avoid the whole activation problem, must keep a backup copy of their MNYCoreFiles as any reinstallation that cannot be updated will likely be unable to read their data file. Loss of Internet Updates also means you won’t be able to get updated investment symbol quotes, exchange rates, and tax rates. There are manual workarounds to these limitations that may or may not be suitable depending on how you use Money and your expectations. Lack of Internet Updates means there won’t ever be any new bug fixes (not that there ever were many, but…)

“Worst Case Scenario”: If, at some point, you are unable to create a working activated installation or did not remove the WinLiveID/Passport from your file before that service breaks, you may find that all the data in your Money data file is effectively lost to you. If this would be a problem, then you should take steps to de-couple that data from the Money data file. Microsoft provided some hints about this on their abandonment Q&A page, and referenced several MSKB items on the subject. But if what they provided on the Q&A is any indication, then the MSKB items are probably borderline useless. There is no one perfect solution, but there are many approaches. Mine are outlined in "Are there any recommendations for assuring short- and long-term "survivability" of my Money data?".

Note that the mechanical methods that exist (reports exported to .CSV, XML, text, QIF export, MoneyLink query) all have limits on what they can capture and there are many data elements in Money that cannot be mechanically extracted by present broadly available (database file hackery excluded) means. (Notes in details of categories, accounts, classification, transaction notes, transaction attachment file URIs, budgets, paycheck element tab assignment, to name just a few.) Each user will have to consider what that data is worth and plan on capturing it by hand to the extent that they care enough to invest the effort. It is possible that Microsoft or others will provide information and/or tools to get around some or all of these issues at some point in the future. Again, each user should consider their plans in light of what is available, not what is rumored or wished for.

Maintenance of Capability

To many of us, Money is a mission critical tool for management of our ongoing financial lives. We use it to plan retirement and to track what bills we need to pay tomorrow. We use it to manage our investments as well as our day-to-day financial tactics for cash flow management and investment purchases and sales. With or without Money, we have to continue managing these things. Microsoft’s announcement alluded to all these “great” capabilities on the web to do this stuff, but many of us—and the insightful people at Microsoft who are not in the PR department—know this just isn’t true. So what do Money users do? First, they must assess what they have valued in their use of Money.

If you cannot function without downloaded transaction data, you need to determine how you are getting that data if you are getting it from within Money. If you have to supply both a WinLiveID/Passport and a user account and password appropriate to your FI’s web site, then you are probably getting the data “via third party” and this capability will end when your copy of M+ expires or by January 31, 2011, whichever comes first. Your bank may provide alternate ways for you to get the same data. For the bigger banks, posting in the may help you find out. Or go to your bank’s web site or call them. If that doesn’t pan out, you will have to find alternate tool(s) to Money.

If you can’t function without downloaded quotes, you will also have to find alternate tool(s) to Money.

If you made it past those two gates, then there seem to be no particular reasons you cannot continue to use M+. The primary issues associated with using M+ essentially forever the activation issue discussed previously as well as those outlined below.

Alternate tools: Alternate tools are already being discussed at great length in the newsgroup. The present consensus indicates that Money will be hard to completely replace functionally. Worse, all replacements identified to date appear to have limited, at best, abilities to migrate existing Money data. For this reason, my present advice is to assume that you will start using (a) new tool(s) in a clean break from Money. Solve the data protection problem as outlined above. Then start anew. Aside from the loss of an integrated dataset, the biggest issue here appears to be migration of investments and cost basis information. Again, the newsgroup will probably remain the best one-stop shop for related information and answers. In any event, assuming you can solve the activated machine problems you have until you can no longer run your last activated installation to find a solution to this problem. Better solutions to migration and/or better alternate tool(s) may appear in the interim. If you can’t live without third party downloaded transaction data, you have until your M+ expires or until January 31, 2011, whichever comes first, to find (an) alternate tool(s) and an acceptable data migration strategy.

Perpetual use of M+: Once you get past the lack of online services, the principal issues associated with using Money in perpetuity come down to:

Activation: Only an installation activated with an available key and updated with the patches prior to the January 31, 2011 cutoff will be suitable for long term use. Except as noted next in the next item, this implies keeping that computer running and not having a hard disk failure and not reinstalling the operating system.

Compatibility in the computing environment: Money has been reported by testers as compatible with Windows 7. Even if methods are found—endorsed by Microsoft or otherwise—to get around the activation requirement, there is no assurance that Money will work in future computing environments beyond that. Sure, a hallmark of the Windows ecology is that running legacy apps in future environments is a pretty important requirement. But it’s no sure thing. However, this problem has become so pervasive that there is a new technology that may help us solve our Money in perpetuity problem. The prime approach I am considering to assure ongoing M+ capability is to get a M+ activated and patched installation running in a Win7 virtual PC (VPC) running Windows XP from a virtual hard disk (VHD). This allows an entire WinXP environment to be encapsulated in a file (the VHD appears to be a hard disk to the virtual PC but is just a disk file in the host environment) and run as long as it is located on some host system (Win7, Win8, whatever will run a VPC from the files on the VHD). That, potentially, supports keeping that one last golden M+ activated installation usable for a long time. This is all theory on my part as I haven’t actually tried it yet. I may be nuts. But it seems the best option going forward and it does address both the computing environment compatibility problem and the activation problem.

It will never improve: Lack of new development means that things like the Tax Estimator and Retirement Planner will never be updated to track any future structural changes in how taxes are determined. Given the lack of functional development in Money since roughly 1998 and the present lack of better alternatives to what Money does today, this doesn’t seem like it can really be considered much of a loss. But it must be a consideration.

Finally

If you have benefited over the years from the newsgroup, please consider your ethical obligation to contribute back to the community: if you have particular success or failure in your efforts to move into the post-Money future, share it. Others may be able to benefit or provide information back to help you.

As always, corrections to facts are solicited. Comments to opinion are welcome, but maybe are better for the newsgroup where all can participate and benefit. This was written wiki wiki since it seemed important and urgent. But it wasn’t written in advance. Even the MVPs didn’t get more than literally a few hours head start on the Microsoft announcement.

Dick Watson, maintainer of this unofficial microsoft.public.money FAQ

If this kind of stuff is important to you: