Intuit Apologizes To TurboTax Customers

"I've talked one-on-one with quite a few customers, so I know this caused some of you considerable hassle and inconvenience," TurboTax general manager Tom Allanson wrote in an open letter of apology.

Mountain View-based Intuit plans to publish the letter as an advertisement in Thursday's editions of USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. The letter also will be posted on several Web sites.

Intuit is seeking forgiveness as it prepares to sell the 2003 edition of TurboTax , a program that generated $423 million, or 26 percent, of the company's revenue in its last fiscal year.

The unusual step serves as another reminder of the aggravation Intuit caused with the anti-piracy measure, known as "product activation," which was designed to prevent buyers from giving the tax program to people who hadn't paid to use it.

Intuit hoped to boost TurboTax sales with an activation code that chained the program to a single computer. The company instead faced an angry backlash from customers who abhorred the restrictions and feared product activation might allow Intuit to spy on their computer hard drives.

Although Intuit insisted many of the complaints were either misguided or unfounded, the chastened company decided in May to dump the effort.

By then, H.R. Block's rival TaxCut program had already tried to undercut Intuit's market-leading position with an ad campaign touting the ability to use TaxCut on multiple computers.

In an interview Wednesday, Allanson said Thursday's letter stems from concerns that Intuit's message of contrition , and its promise to drop product activation , hasn't been connecting with enough irritated customers.

Intuit concluded some TurboTax users were so upset with product activation that they might not even open an apology letter if it were mailed to them, Allanson said.