Microsoft Money

» see microsoft.com/money as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

microsoft money launched on october 7, 1991 as the redmond answer to quicken. you bought it in a shrinkwrap box at compusa, installed it from a cd-rom, and used it to track your checkbook plus a small portfolio of mutual funds. money 95 was the first proper win32 version. by money 97, online banking was in the box. activation showed up in money 2007. money plus, released that same year, turned out to be the last retail edition before microsoft started winding the line down.

by the late 2000s the personal finance category had moved to the web. mint launched in 2007. running a desktop app just to reconcile your bank statements started feeling like the thing your dad still did. on june 30, 2009, microsoft stopped selling money, citing declining demand for a comprehensive personal finance toolset. a free edition called money plus sunset shipped in 2010 with no online features, just a way for people to keep their old.mny data files readable. official support ended on january 31, 2011.

i never used it. money was a US-market product. in turkey personal finance software did not have a serious retail shelf, and most people who tracked their finances at all did it in excel or in a paper notebook. i saw the box in catalog inserts at home in the late 90s and never knew anyone who actually ran it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually was ~

a personal finance manager for windows, branded heavily around the suburban-american ritual of monthly budget reconciliation. you imported transactions from your bank and sorted them into envelopes like groceries or utilities. the app produced charts. it could schedule bills and track investments. for users who lived inside money for a decade, the.mny file format mattered more than the application itself, and exporting cleanly to anything else became its own subculture after the shutdown.

~ why it lost ~

quicken was already the default. intuit had a multi-decade head start plus the accountant network that mattered for tax season. money was the second option people bought when quicken felt too expensive. once mint started reading bank credentials directly through aggregator apis, the desktop apps both lost their reason to exist as installs. quicken survived by going subscription. money did not.

~ the sunset edition ~

microsoft did one quiet thing right at the end. money plus sunset, released free in 2010, let existing users keep opening their data files for years after the official shutdown. no online features and no support, only a viewer with edit rights. for anyone who had a decade of their financial history sitting in an.mny file, this was the difference between losing it and keeping it. some users were still running it in windows 10 compatibility mode well into the 2020s.

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