Scotty,

I was one of the participants of tonights town hall.

I upgraded from OSX 10.6.8 to Mountain Lion OSX 10.8.3 as you suggested . . .

But now I am told that three of the programs that I use constantly no longer work on my Mac!!??!!  They are Quicken 2007, Finale 2006 and Microsoft Office Suite.

Furthermore I am told that now I can't even access my Quicken data files.

In short, this is a disaster.  Any suggestions?  Can I reverse the procedure?

I use Quicken, Finale and Microsoft Office every day for my work.  Sure would love to hear what you may suggest.

Thanks.  
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Yes, you have each of these pieces of software you mentioned all ran through a translator on your computer called rosetta because they were originally written for PowerPC machines. Able gave a window of about 6 years for all software companies to update their code after they made the switch to intel processors. Some made the conversion faster than others. In 10.8 rosetta was taken out which means users would have needed to move to the next version of each of these. So here’s what that means for your case:

Quicken offers a free updated version of Quicken 2007 for intel that fixes their older broken software. Quicken® Mac 2007 Personal Finance Software - Mac Financial Software

You were using Microsoft Office 2004 or earlier which is now 9 years old. Your choices here are:

update to the latest version of Office ($140) Microsoft Office for Mac | Office For Mac
use their new subscription service called Office 365 which requires a monthly fee for Office. This is the new trend and where many software companies are headed. Buy Office for Mac | Office For Mac
Consider Pages and Numbers. Apple’s equivalent to Office. Each application is $20 each and it works great. You just need to remember that if you’re sending a document to someone to save it as a .doc file or .xls file. It’s fine. Yes, it’s compatible with all word formats and will read all your old documents just fine. (available in the app store here)
Open Office is a free version of Microsoft Office. It’s open source which means it was written by crowd sourcing. It’s fine and FREE!

Lastely, Finale 2006. This one will be a little harder. Finale didn’t re write 2006. They only support 2010 and higher on Lion and above. This means an upgrade to a never version of Finale is an inevitability.

Change is hard. However, software and hardware changes so very often it’s difficult to keep up. We have to stay on top of all the updates and that’s a big job. The longer we wait between updates the worse the process is. It’s sort of like going to the dentist. If you go twice a year it’s not so bad, but if you only go once every five years, a lot of pain awaits. I speak from personal experience.

Can the upgrade be reversed? Technically yes. It would require you erase your drive, reinstall 10.6 from an old disc, create a new temporary user, run all your updates to get to 10.6.8, then use the migration assistant to move all your data back over to your drive from a time machine backup. However, I would not consider doing this. It is really best to move forward as painful as it seems. You will only delay the inevitable and more pain will lie ahead.
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update: Thanks Scotty!!  You're right change is hard. I've found that there will be a learning curve for OSX 10.8.3. :  /

After I sent you my frantic email last night I was a le to find the Quicken update. Intuit charged me $14.95 for the free update. : )

I actually found and bought Pages. Really happy about that. I've never been a fan of Word but had to get it years ago when AppleWorks went away. 

Get the Finale update was inevitable. They just charge an arm and a leg. I had 1.1 and back hen it was Mac based only. 

Thanks for all the info last night. I'll be back. 

All is good!  Thanks for your reply.