Bloglines - Quicken gets an update, and my hall of fame list

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Quicken gets an update, and my hall of fame list By jeff It's hard to imagine that this product can get any better, but Intuit keeps finding stuff to put in it (and do it smartly). This got me to thinking about my shortlist of PC applications that had as broad an impact as Quicken has over the years. Here would be my top 10 hall of fame list for PC products that had the most profound impact on their target, in no particular order: 1) Visicalc - Lotus - Excel: Visicalc laid the basic foundation, Lotus was much better, and Excel was better still. In many ways the PC revolution of the early 1980's owes it's success to Visicalc and Lotus... the first IT job I had was in my last year of high school when a furniture company hired me to man a single IBM PC they bought for the sole purpose of running Lotus. I turned out some wicked bar charts on that 8086-equipped PC. 2) Quicken: still a leader after 2 decades. The impact of Quicken is less a story about personal computers and more about how the company brought personal finance management to so many households. 3) Photoshop with Kai's Power Tools: Photoshop was a amazing, but nobody can say they were not blown away seeing Kai's Power Tools for the first time 4) MSOffice: Yes, Wordperfect was better in the beginning and Lotus was more widely used... but Microsoft invented the suite approach to office productivity tools. 5) CorelDraw!: Their methods for manipulating objects made it possible for an entire "middle class" of computer users to use computer graphics products 6) Aldus Pagemaker: Everybody could be a desktop publisher, and the quality of everything from newsletters to technical publications benefited. 7) WinZip: In the age of floppy disks, WinZip was essential. The odd thing is that there were other utilities that did the same thing as WinZip, but for some reason WinZip was just a lot better. 8) Netscape: The world (tech and non-tech alike) would be a much different place had Netscape not been created. 9) Frontpage: Did for HTML design what Pagemaker did for desktop publishing. 10) Eudora: Long before there was Exchange and Outlook there was Eudora. I remember using Pine and VMail when someone turned me onto Eurdora... blew me away with the folder list pane, which is still the dominant email UI model today. 10.5) Napster: The aspect that is extraordinary about Napster is how quickly it spread and what an impact it had. Fast forward to today and applications as diverse as Skype and Groove are built on the concept of P2P networking that Napster invented. Link: Quicken Premier 2006 review by PC Magazine. The new Quicken Premier 2006 shows more innovation than we thought possible in a mature (22 years and counting) software package. The new Quicken breaks down existing features into more productive tools, while also making solid advances in areas like reporting and document management.