Today Intuit published an Open Letter to TurboTax Users, apologizing for problems caused by their activation (anti-piracy) restrictions that limited TurboTax to run on only one PC.
In response to feedback from our customers, I want you to know that we're making an important change to TurboTax software and have removed activation technology.
The new TurboTax for Tax Year 2003 Software can be used fully on multiple computers.
I wrote about this back in February when I was starting my taxes. I only needed to load it on one PC, but still find this sort of thing extremely annoying.
When you think about their software business, all they need to do is to keep incrementally improving the software and they've got a captive customer base willing to pay $50 per year to do their taxes. (Obviously there are competitors like TaxCut but I bet people stick with what they're used to.) Now that it's October and people will start thinking about their taxes again, Intuit obviously doesn't want to lose customers.
