Ultimately I believe this will be good for personal finance users, although I expect a few rough years for Intuit employees and their customers, too. What will Patzer do with the ailing Quicken product line? While he hasn't taken the role officially yet-the acquisition has yet to close-already we can see that there may be a few conflicts as the two products come under unified management. Quicken 2010 is a bit easier to user than Quicken 2009. (TurboTax will stay with Patzer's new boss, Dan Maurer, senior vice president of the Intuit consumer group.) When the Mint acquisition closes, Patzer will be vice president and general manager of the personal finance group at Intuit, which will include Mint as well as Quicken.
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Patzer, who had held several engineering jobs, including at Sony (working on the PlayStation) and at Internet start-ups, founded the company in his own kitchen table moment, when he became frustrated with existing personal finance software apps-like Quicken.Īnd now the upstart is moving into the big house. The way we grow this, we realized, was to look for acquisitions."įortunately, while Quicken was alienating users, in 2005 Mint was born. We weren't thinking beyond the desktop solution. As Miller says, "There were decisions made over time that had the unintended consequence of putting the Quicken business where it was starved for focus and resources."įinally, though, the light began to dawn at Intuit. (Our official reviews score the products higher.)Īnother reason that Quicken suffered: Intuit shifted its focus away from the flagship product to new moneymakers, in particular its small-business product, QuickBooks, and its tax software and service, TurboTax. Few products have user reviews scores as low: none of the variations of of Quicken from recent years have user reviews garnering more than 1 and a half stars out of 5. That had a direct effect on the quality of the product." You can see the effect on CNET's own reviews. More importantly, as Julie Miller, director of corporate communications for the consumer group at Intuit told me, "Quicken made its way through the organization. Mint got access to investment data a year ago. It became more capable but also more complex, harder to use, and much harder to get started with.
The original Quicken, little more than an DOS-based checkbook and register, over time became an ambitious personal finance suite that handled budgeting, retirement planning, loans, public equities and employee stock options. The product, according to Intuit legend, started at founder Scott Cook's kitchen table in 1983 as he watched his wife struggle with paying bills. It's a shame that we think of Quicken that way, but it's Intuit's own fault that we've gotten here.
It doesn't look good for the old desktop app, Quicken. Upstart Mint, which is being acquired by Intuit for $170 million, has a personal finance product more in line with the times, with a younger demographic, a working business model, and a passionate CEO, Aaron Patzer, who's slated to take over the Quicken product line at Intuit once the acquisition closes. Conventional wisdom is that Intuit's acquisition of the personal finance Web service Mint will mean the end of the line for the company's standalone software app, Quicken.
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