Comments on: How Intuit managed to hold off Microsoft

Scott Cook was one of the first executives to go head-to-head on Redmond's home turf and live to tell about it.

[jessiethe3rd]

Money was an okay product but just to be perfectly honest, it was away from its core product line. We've seen the end of several key Microsoft products as of recently:

* Performance Point Server (Proclarity acquisition)
- most functionality running into MOSS Enterprise possibly

* Image Editing Software
- get away from competing with Adobe solid solution for picture editing

* Money
- not really a super big money maker

It's important for any company to smarten-up its portfolio of offerings. It helps get back to the key franchises of the brand. Now that Microsoft has taken the money out of these projects it can focus on more important things and possibly cut a bit of operational cost. Not such a bad thing. Being good at what you do is important. It's especially important to recognize you are not going to have the flag ship product. Cost versus Revenue... it's a simple game of math. These products just weren't cutting it.

[corbey50]

Intuit also made it almost impossible for people to switch to Money by using a proprietary very version of the QFX file format. In recent years, I suspect that's the main reason that Intuit continues to hang on to its Quicken customers.

[thegooglegeek]

First of all we are making too big of a deal about this. MS Money has been dead for years. But there is a bigger issue. The personal finance software sector has been suffering for years. Even quicken has been steadily losing customers. The key functionality in personal fiance software was the ability to download statements and pay bills on line. Both of which are now available for free (or minimal charge) from your local bank. The rest of the functionality can be found in free services such as Mint. Intuit gets most of its revenue from smb oriented Quickbooks and related products and services. MS Money shutting down is a non event. The real question is why did not MS pursue a web only strategy and put the MS Money web edition in the hands of its banking partners. Another question -- why launch a traditional software product Office Accounting in 2004 to compete against Quickbooks. Why not a web only product? Again Microsoft just does not get the web and is too locked up in its traditional software world. They had a chance to really go after Intuit with a slick web based solution when Intuit had nothing in that space. Now the growth of Quickbooks online outpaces Quickbooks desktop software edition. the future for consumer and smb accounting software is on the web and mobile devices.

[jessiethe3rd]

The question is how do you know these aren't the plans? I sure don't. :) Making supportable software and applications COST money. Support the eco-system - costs money. In tough times (and trust me - these are tough times as consumers are NOT buying...) why spend capital taking care of a product that doesn't resonate well with the user community. It's better to cut your loses and focus on the things that make you who you are as a company and expand in areas which there could be potential growth.

See Windows 7
See Xbox Live & Natal
See Office 2010
See Sharepoint 2010
See Windows Phone 7 (boy I'd like to see... where you be!?)
See Zune Marketplace

[gaia1muse]

Someone else mentioned David and Goliath further up and what the story doesn't tell is that when there was SOME competition to Intuit they were an incredible company working hard to develop their product, respond to the customer base and maintain their customer's loyalty. Afterwards? It became and remains one of the worst companies ever when it comes to consumer responsiveness. The concept that monopolies don't need to care about their buyers is really true. And sorry to bring the Bush administration in here -- but since that administration's support of the idea that large corporate mergers are okay --I think the symptom of the customer being at the bottom of the satisfaction chain has gotten a lot worse across the broad spectrum of American industry. The "Great recession" is helping somewhat...they have to figure out some way to get consumers spending again. And beginning to respond to our complaints somewhat...what a novel idea!

[pentest]

Microsoft can not compete on a level playing field.

[yacahuma]

Ive been using Quicken for years, and I hate it. I just dont like it. I have been looking for a web solution that will compare to Quicken Home and Business. Any suggestions?

In the UK we have had our share of being bitten twice from Microsoft and Inuit with the loss of support for MS Money and Quicken. I have switched to a pretty good personal finance product by http://www.banktree.co.uk They provide an excellent level of support via phone and email.

[jragosta]

I will never buy another Intuit product - even if the alternative is from Microsoft.

I bought 5 copies of Point of Sale (aptly called POS by everyone on the Intuit forum) for my company. Among the problems:

- Wouldn't even install on some of the brand new Dell Vista and XP systems.
- Even after installing, wouldn't run on some systems.
- Tech support on some distant planet (apparently) had no solution other than "uninstall POS" reboot and reinstall. After I did that 3 times and it didn't work, they said to wipe the hard drive and install Vista from scratch then install POS. After THAT didn't work, they told me to do it while they waited on the line to be sure I did it right.
- When I finally figured out (on my own after I gave up on their tech support) that the problem was that I needed a newer version of .Net than shipped with Vista or new XP systems, I finally got the system working. But the results are bizarre. I wanted to find out my sales in the previous months. There are a dozen different ways to do this AND THEY ALL GIVE DIFFERENT RESULTS. So our sales are different depending on which report I'm looking at?
- We started up with the POS database on one of the workstations and then wanted to move it to a real server. Moving the database doesn't work. You have to uninstall POS on all the systems and then reinstall to make it work.
- There's lots more, but that's more than enough to show the gross incompetence of the company.

Never again.

[Heebee Jeebies]

Like Intuits all that great. Out with one crook in with another.

Robert

[eugenefoolstak]

Smart move by MS. Traditional pay-to-play software products in the financial services space are being undermined by the mint.com's of the world. I don't see this as a victory for Intuit. I see this as Microsoft having the business acumen to realize that the paid financial software market has dried up.

[hmelnick]

There used to be a great DOS program called Managing Your Money. MYM were slow getting a usable Windows product out the door, and Quicken hurt them on price. MSFT try to by MYM but were blocked by anti-competition rulings. Nations Bank (now B of A) bought MYM but never made a go of it. When I realized MYM was a gonner, I ran Quicken and Money side-by-side for a year, decided Money was more like MYM and decided to stay with that. Also, I had hopes that a strong company like MSFT would ensure that Money would be around because switching financial software is a PITA. Money continued to be a good product through 2004 but thereafter improvements in some areas were offset by deficiencies in other areas. I sure hope MSFT and Intuit develop software to make the conversion automatic. If they succeed, I guess I'll be back to Quicken. Meanwhile, I'll have a look at some on line products to see if any offer the comprehensive featues of Money. Any suggestiohs?

[407tec]

I have bought and used many versions of both Quicken and Microsoft Money every since I had to get off of MYM. Quicken was by far the harder to use. It would terminate abnormally over and over again. I would install it on multiple machines with the same result. Rarely does Microsoft Money fail me. I have used the file conversion from Money to Quicken and find it to be a waist of time. It would have taken less time to manually enter everything. I uninstalled and reinstalled Quicken just ot keep up with any development they may have been doing. I have waisted time and money with each and every version of Quicken that I have purchased and installed. At least once I received a free version of Quicken that was distributed with my new computerand never even took it out the srink wrap. I hate to see Microsoft Money be discontinued. I have never found a product that I wanted to replace Microsoft Money with and I have actually bought many of them.

[Ortaias]

Good article, But what I find frustrating with these types of articles, while they are accurate, they don't really get down to the dynamics of how the business operate. In short, Both Microsoft and Intuit are inept. As a Quicken user, I will go on to say that Quicken is a despicable company with an aggressive and abusive marketing effort.

Quicken, was once a good company. However, over the years the quality of this company has declined. Also Quicken is no longer innovative, it is simply a cash cow to feed Intuit revenue.

While it may not be the intent of Cnet to be a consumer advocate, i would encourage Cnet to expose abusive and disingenuous business practices. The abusive practices of Quicken need to be exposed so that consumers are forewarned with real information. Cnet will be providing a beneficial public service.

[sanjayb]

I have been using Quicken for 15 yrs now. In that time I only had bought 3 different versions of Quicken. The version of Quicken I use is Quicken 2006. I luv Quicken. I don't know what I would do without it. I have never been a big fan of downloading my recent transactions and automatically importing them into Quicken. I prefer to add the transactions manually the way I want them entered.
I tried Money sometime ago. There wasn't anything special about the program that tempted me to switch. I just hope that MS dumping Money won't mean Quicken will stop making the Quicken product better. I hope the other online offerings provide enough competition to keep Intuit honest. I have no desire to switch.
Now I wish Intuit could build a decent Mac version of Quicken.

A happy Quicken user.

[Crematum]

I actually liked Money. I switched from Quicken about a year ago when I got sick of their shoddy software and support. Money actually worked and didn't do anything to my system. Quicken, whether or not people know it (maybe this has been corrected in the past year), installed some system level hooks to catch keyboard or mouse movements. Whenever the software was running, these hooks would be up and running also. Not sure why, but I'm also a software developer and use vmware to help test on various operating systems. If I had Quicken running when VMware was up, VMware would throw fits. I eventually discovered it was quicken that was causing the problems. Also impacted some other software I use (typically only occured if Quicken was running while other software was running). I'm not making this up, lots of people moaned about it on the VMWare and Quicken forums back when I stopped using Quicken. Now I wonder what the heck I'm going to use.

[abcd9009]

I have stopped using BOTH Money and Quicken. I now use Mint.com which is FREE and will add new institutions and features automatically FOR FREE and I can use it from any computer.
Ever tried Quicken Online. HORRIBLE!!! Worst online financial service ever. Can't believe it's from the same people who created Quicken.
Microsoft should just ditch all other products and just stick with Windows, Office, and XBox and outsource the rest.

[rdean]

While I can appreciate that Microsoft has gained some much-needed humility from the failure of Money, it's not a good thing that Microsoft is exiting the market.

A market with only one dominant player doesn't see innovation, such as when Microsoft's IE dominated after a combination of Microsoft's competitive moves (both legitimate and not) and Netscape's failures. The market needs more than one dominant player. Ideally it needs more than two -- IE and Firefox are now both being pushed by Safari, Chrome, and Opera to get better.

With less competition, I doubt Intuit will innovate on Quicken as rapidly as it used to.