The Way We Were

By Jerry Pournelle

April 18, 2005

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Column 297

Tax Time

As soon as I finish this column I have to do the taxes. As usual I'll be using TurboTax. I've used TurboTax since about 1986 when it first came out as MacInTax and only worked on the Macintosh. I said then that it was worth keeping a Mac just for that program, and I meant every word of it.

Actually, of course, I've had at least one working Mac since the first one came out. It was never my primary system, but there were always things easily done with a Mac that were difficult-to-impossible with anything else.

For a long time Apple owned the desktop publishing industry. The first spreadsheet programs were written for pre-Mac Apple computers, and both Microsoft PowerPoint and Excel were written for the Mac. A tax program that linked spreadsheets with graphic forms so that you could print out the result in a format acceptable to the IRS was just perfect for the Mac. It was years before Windows could do that.

You'd think with all those advantages Apple would have kept a higher market share. Apple corporate strategy has never been easy to figure out, but it has always been clear that they've gone after immediate profit rather than building market share. It's an odd strategy that took them to the brink of disaster more than once, but every time something would happen to bail them out. VisiCalc saved Apple ][, Excel and desktop publishing saved the Mac. Now they've got music, Apple rules in coolness, and the MiniMac gives them a real horse in the market share race.

Meanwhile, MacInTax got bought by TurboTax and moved to Windows. There's still a Mac edition of TurboTax, and I presume it works the same as the Windows edition; I haven't used TurboTax for the Mac. Windows TurboTax can grab all the information from last year's tax program, including year-end inventory values and other such holdover data, so I have a real incentive to keep using it year after year; and for me it Just Works.

TurboTax is especially useful for those who keep their books with Intuit Quicken.

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