Intuit has finally come to its senses regarding its stupid activation mechanism for TurboTax.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based software maker will discard its so-called product activation feature, the company announced Wednesday when it reported third-quarter earnings.

“Intuit has a long heritage of doing right by customers, and some of our customers didn’t have the great experience they expect from Intuit,” Steve Bennett, chief executive of the company, said in a statement. “Therefore we’ve decided to discontinue product activation next season.”

The introduction of product activation technology in TurboTax for the 2002 tax year also failed to deliver the additional revenue and profit growth the company had anticipated, Bennett added. Even so, Intuit reported revenue rose by 29 percent and net income more than doubled in the quarter ended April 30, compared with the same period a year ago. The company said growth was driven by gains in its TurboTax business, which brought in $313.1 million in revenue for the quarter.

Product activation is a controversial antipiracy approach that locks a piece of software to a specific PC. Intuit’s version, developed by Macrovision, runs in the background on the PC and checks for a unique activation number generated when TurboTax is installed and stored on the PC’s hard drive. The technology is intended to prevent customers from printing or filing returns from any PC other than the original machine that was used to activate the software.

Customers complained, however, that the technology could make it difficult to continue using TurboTax if they were to acquire a new PC or hard drive. Many customers said they were annoyed that the product activation mechanism continually ran in the background, even when TurboTax wasn’t being used, monopolizing a small chunk of their PC’s memory.

All that the activation feature did was generate ill-will, complaints, and calls to tech support.  I know that I don’t like to pay for the priviledge of being treated like a thief.  In fact, I resolved never to purchase another piece of their desktop software (of any kind) as long as they continued using this activation software (and I only reluctantly used their online tax filing software, after I couldn’t get their competitor’s product to work).

And I don’t like the product activation crap in Windows XP, either, but their market position kind of forced me into using it (that and I didn’t want to have to deal with wiping and reinstalling my new laptop with Linux).

Now, perhaps I’ll consider purchasing Quicken again, since my foray into using Money ended badly.  I’m trying to find a good solution to keeping track of my accounts.  Despite being a techno-geek, I still maintain my bank account via an old-fashioned check register (and such high-tech devices as a pen and a calculator).  I ordered the BankOne branded version of Money (it had a 30-day free trial and was $29.99 if I wanted to buy it, as opposed to $59.99 normally; although now I see that Amazon has it for $19.99 after rebates).  Unfortunately, Money ate my data file after about a week (it was just gone, nowhere to be found).  That really ticked me off, since I’d spent a lot of time entering all of my account information and financial data into it.