Quicken's letter to Mac users — click to enlarge

It takes world-class talent to screw up a relationship as well as Intuit has done with its Mac-based customers. It’s a feat that’s taken over ten years to accomplish.

Intuit has just announced that Quicken, the personal finance manager, is coming back as a Mac product — an act of extraordinary nerve, considering the history of this product.

Quicken was never exactly a star performer on the Mac. From its debut eons ago, it played second fiddle to the PC version. Every year, there would be promises that its features would catch up, but every year it remained significantly behind. But at least they were coming out with an update every year.

Quicken for Mac 2007 was the most recent version, and that was released in 2006. To say it had become long-in-the-tooth would be a serious understatement.

Intuit’s paper-thin commitment to Mac users sputtered to pure nothingness back in July when Lion appeared. Having required Mac OS X’s Rosetta feature to run all these years — because Intuit couldn’t be bothered to turn Quicken for Mac into a real Intel-based app  — it literally became a non-option for anyone who wanted to enjoy the benefits of Lion.

Thus, the mass exodus of those Quicken for Mac users who remained after all those years of previous neglect.

The only option remaining for the Mac people was to switch to Quicken Essentials, which strips away even more features from Quicken than Quicken for Mac ever stripped away from the PC version. The reviews of Quicken Essentials have been consistently negative.

But now Intuit is back. The last known users of Quicken for Mac are receiving the letter above — pretty stunning even by Intuit standards.

Proudly, they tell us that Quicken for Mac isn’t dead after all. If all goes according to plan, sometime around spring 2012, we’ll be able to run Quicken 2007.

The only people who would find solace in this are those diehard Quicken for Mac users who made the decision not to upgrade to Lion just so they could keep using their old Quicken. (Users of Essentials will also be able to move back to the full version.)

One would think they’d at least throw in a few new features and call it Quicken for Mac 2012. It’s just hard to imagine what kind of marketing brains are behind this operation.

Making it all the more inexplicable is that Bill Campbell is the current chairman of Intuit and former CEO, a current and long-time member of the Apple board of directors, and was extremely close to Steve Jobs.

Lest we forget, back in the late 90s, Intuit sent out a different letter to its Mac base — to inform them that the company was pulling out of the Mac market. Quicken for Mac would be no more. I remember how disappointed I was as a user of that product. There was a little firestorm over that move, and a short time later Intuit announced that due to the response, they would scrap their plans to scrap the product.

Unfortunately, they didn’t even bother to send a follow-up email to those who had received the “we’re outta here” email.

At that time, I was working with Apple and told this sad story to Steve Jobs himself one night. Steve was surprised to hear that they’d never sent a follow-up email and agreed that it was a boneheaded marketing move. He told me that he’d talk to Bill Campbell about it. I have no idea if he ever did — but I never received another email from Intuit. I wonder how many customers they lost by that move alone.

Of course, as things turned out, Intuit didn’t exactly stick with us anyway. They stopped caring about the Mac users again back in 2006.

The good news is, now they’re coming back. At some nebulous time in the future. With a product frozen in its 2007 state — which was already a few years behind its time.

But at least this time we got an email.