Intuit Not Out to Change Mint Says Founder

I guess that was exactly what I needed to hear.
Excited to be a part of the process.

Great message, Mr Cook. I concur with many of the comments above, however I do have one addition thought I’d ask you to consider:

While injecting the creative spirit and approach of the Mint team into the Quicken organization is great, I’m concerned that this will be diluted. I see little customer or shareholder value in continuing both the hosted Quicken product as well as Mint. Doing so will spread your recently acquired Mint top talent far too thin.

Shareholder expectation will inevitably force Intuit to perform “cost containment” measures within your R&D organization — it always happens. So instead of needing to maintain two talent pools for hosted personal finance solutions, double-down with Mint, thereby affording the creative juices of Aaron and other Mint talent to only need to focus on one hosted solution and one desktop alternative. Further, this will also allow you to maintain appropriate investment levels within both the personal finance desktop and the hosted development teams.

Thanks for the consideration and best of luck.

My parents drove Ford and GM cars. I drive a Toyota not because Toyota’s are “the latest and greatest.” I drive a Toyota because I hated the unreliable Fords and GMs. Likewise, I switched to Mint because Quicken became unusable and increasingly frustrating. The users of Mint aren’t there because our parents used Quicken, as you had insinuated. The users of Mint INTENTIONALLY left frustrating tools like Quicken. This is why we are so disappointed of Mint’s acquisition. This, added to Intuit’s past record of dissolving acquisitions (as many have mentioned), make us scrambling for alternatives.

Having said that, given your commitment to leave Mint alone, I will likely stick around to see what comes next. But be advised, I along with many existing Mint customers, will likely leave at the first sign of Mint being “Intuitized.”

It makes no financial sense to maintain a Quicken product as well as a Mint. There are huge economies of scale in software, meaning that an incremental user creates almost zero cost to the creator of software–no way does it makes sense to maintain two products.

Just what we needed to hear, my confidence in Mint is restored! Good luck in the future!

Hi Scott –
I doubt that you will ever read this but… Gary Mazo here. I am one of those who used Quicken very soon after you invented and published it. I still remember when it fit on two 3 1/2 inch floppy disks. Imagine – a Quicken with a 3 Mb install footprint! I also bought every update of Quicken ever since, and watch it become heavier and heavier and more and more infested with bugs. I stopped buying it about 1 year ago and switched to Mint. So you probably should not insult your “more mature” audience.

I myself have been in software development for over 20 years. And I very well know that as software products are invented and go through their life cycle they reach what I call “maturity bloat”. Like stars, they become red giants and their fate is to eventually collapse and die. My suggestion to you — kill the “fat client” of Quicken.
And echoing many people here, I don’t even mind being charged for some “enhanced” version of Mint online. Or perhaps you can find a way to do smart product placement so that all versions of Mint stay entirely free. But I can tell you for certain – your old Quicken is dead.

Intuit’s track record with software and customer service isn’t good. I was one of your first customers, but after being constantly nudged to pay for every service, after already purchasing the software, I moved on to MS Money. How ironic that Money is being discontinued, that I moved over to Mint, and now Mint is being purchased by Intuit. Six degrees of separation.

I realize the point of creating a software company is to generate profit, but Quicken’s track record with usability–especially on the Mac–is dreadful, as is your customer service. That would seem to indicate that the way to generate that profit was to skimp wherever possible on cost centers that didn’t directly affect profit.

There is a lot of missing functionality in Mint that users are looking for. Reading the Mint forum will show you many of those areas. I hope that Aaron’s newly found wealth won’t distract him from his original mission with Mint. His own posts on the Mint site state his dissatisfaction with Quicken as a product which led him to create Mint. Therefore, I hope you’re both sincere about your intent, and that your true motive wasn’t to acquire Mint and then dispose of your competition.

I appreciate the promises about the future of Mint. However, Quicken/Intuit has a history of taking free, usefull tools, buying them, and then charging for their use. I used to use a tool called Quickbase, back when it was free. Then Intuit bought it and started charging for it so I haven’t used it since.

I’m a Quicken user, and have been for 15 years. I like it; it makes my life easier, especially at tax time. Mint offered another view; simple, clean, fast. I hope this distinction is preserved.

When large companies swallow smaller ones they ALWAYS say they “won’t make any changes” and “we will just provide more resources so they can do a better job.” It’s NEVER true! The executives at the larger companies think they’re smarter than those at the little place, after all, “we got to be big and powerful.”

I am over 60 years old, and I didn’t really appreciate the obvious pandering to young people. Older people use the Web, too, in case you hadn’t noticed.

Intuit had a loyal and well deserved following for many years. How did they go so far astray? Arrogance and complacency. Now we are to believe somehow this acquisition will cure that. I personally doubt it. But I’ll stick around and keep my fingers crossed.

Scott,
Please listen to what is being said again and again. Quicken and the Intuit customer service model is no good AS IT IS…Mint can make you a mint. You can actually charge people for the service but DON’T screw it up by making it like Quicken. Give Aaron his head…let him lead the way…most everyone will applaud you if you just let him lead on with Mint, even if you charge for it.

OMG this is REALLY bad news folks. I am one of those 20th century people, mentioned prior, that first purchased Quicken desktop around 1995. As the years and Quicken versions progressed, their product become more and more bug ridden. In 2006, virtually every time I fired up Quicken, it conducted a bug fix update and resulting new problems occurred. Finally I reverted to an older and more stable version until I was ‘forced’ off it by Intuit’s obsolescent policy and had to upgrade. Hey, I have no problem paying for something that adds value and works. Well it gets worse … in late 2006 Quickens ‘stock price updater’ stopped working – a key functionality. Multiple calls to their India support center were useless; they admitted they had a known problem and were working on it. Guess what ? It took Intuit 11 months to finally fix the problem. You should have seen the blog/boards posts of loyal Quicken users – total disgust. Cutting to the chase, I was done too and at that time I migrated to MS Money and then Mint.com.

Don’t trust Intuit – they have a horrible track record for fleecing its customers and crappy software releases. Let me be clear ‘free’ was never an issue for me. I upgraded Quicken countless times like thousands of other folks. The product went from rock solid to unusable in 2005-2007. Mint works great for me – not because it’s free – but because it’s a solid and a value add product.

I am disappointed and very concerned of Mint’s acquisition. I will begin to look for alternatives product sets shortly. Hey Scott – I and a significant number of existing Mint customers, will likely leave Mint at the very first sign of Mint going down the tubes as Quicken did.

Jerry

Really, let’s not bs us, cuz in this economy, that carries no weight with us.

Promises from Intuit, honestly are not worth much…

So get your act in gear, and start being a company that delivers good quality products and services…

This has not been so for a long time, and everyone know’s that…

I started using Quicken in 1995. Compared to SaaS models of today, the Intuit Quicken product is a dinosaur desktop application. There are many inherent hurdles selling/developing/supporting desktop software, which Quicken would often trip over.

I left Quicken and moved to Mint. I believe Intuit knew that many Quicken customers were switching to Mint. I’m sure the exodus was being felt and discussed in the boardrooms. I believe Intuit bought Mint to stop the hemorrhaging.

Now what? I think Intuit knows what people want, they just bought it.

100% ditto.

given that the response to your acquisition has been almost entirely negative, i hope you take this opportunity to make a change for the better in the way your company operates. we’re tired of the intuit monopoly on accounting. we’re tired of intuit’s proprietary formats that make managing our data a nightmare. we’re tired of being nickel and dimed to death.

My main questions is will this “merger” bring with it larger bank data compatibility? I currently use Quicken Online and I like it pretty well. However, Mint can’t import my Banks data where as Quicken can. Will this merging of the 2 allow me to eventually be able to actually import my bank info into mint?