Private equity firm, huh? First round of layoffs w/in 6 weeks.
yeah, thats what happened at TIBCO. They got trim it right away.
Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout
41–50 of 110 posts
Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout
#42Intuit has squandered the Quicken brand for years with lousy updates and even worse customer support. In some respects it's good to see them sell it to someone who might do something with it. Unfortunately, the Quicken name is now so tarnished that the private equity firm likely has one swing at a decent update. Anything less than a homerun and they might as well shut it down.
Since it is a private equity firm, what makes you think they are interested in doing anything other than gutting the business?
Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout
#43Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout
#44Interesting. I wonder if this is the start of a pattern of desktop companies who have converted to SaaS ditching their origins. It makes sense that there is residual value, and the current owners don't want to be distracted.
If the SaaS companies are dumping their desktop offerings, who is buying them? Like you, I'm wondering if this really is a pattern, but it sounds interesting.
Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout
#45Quicken is good when it works with your bank, I have a bank that doesn't work with Quicken and only exports to an older Quicken file format that is no longer supported. I remember when Microsoft Money was Sun downed, I thought Quicken had beaten them. But it seems Inuit still has financial problems and sold Quicken.
Amazingly Microsoft Money Sunset is still available as a download and free to use. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/search/result.aspx?q=Money+p...
Thank You!! This is the best news I heard all day. I loved MS Money and only moved away because I thought it was inevitable. I didn't know about this option.
Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout
#46On a Mac, the only software I've been able to migrate to is Banktivity (formerly iBank). The migration wasn't perfect but I eventually successfully ported over more than a decade of transactions including investments.
Every once in a while I look into gnucash or ledger but so far I've always run out of steam before I've been able to ensure that they'd truly give me feature parity for the features I care about.
At any rate though, it is a joy to not be using Quicken anymore.
Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout
#47Interesting that it's a management buyout. It sounds like the head of Quicken has a significant stake in this buyout. So, obviously he has some amount of confidence in the company to put his own money into it.
Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout
#48If there was one piece of desktop software that I think the world definitely needs an alternative for it's Quicken. I've got about 15 years of my financial life in my Quicken file, and I probably have used the software at least twice a week, religiously, during that time period. I've grown so dependent on it in a way I've never grown dependent on any other software. If it were to stop functioning tomorrow, I'd be screwed.
It's funny because I'm sure I don't even use like 95% of Quicken. I don't use the budget, or the bill paying, or the charts and reports, or the tax crap, or the retirement planning or all the other various bells and whistles Intuit has decided to bolt on to its vast menu structure over the years. I use it as a checkbook register and as a way to plan the month so I don't overdraw my checking account (which would probably happen monthly if I didn't have Quicken), and to download credit card transactions weekly to watch for fraud. That's it. Surely those two functions are the MVP for any alternative.
There is no way in hell I am going to upload 15 years of financial history to "the cloud". Not a snowball's chance in hell. And yes, I've tried GnuCash. It's just not as good. Clunky UI, double-entry accounting, Yuck.
Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anecdata of size 1: I used Mint initially, and then gave up on it. I was too scared of keeping all my eggs in one basket!
This is why I refuse to do credit score tracking on Mint. They do not need that information.
Pocketsmith flips the model - rather than you being the product to sell to others they charge the users and don't share anything with anybody.
Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout
#50Intuit has squandered the Quicken brand for years with lousy updates and even worse customer support. In some respects it's good to see them sell it to someone who might do something with it. Unfortunately, the Quicken name is now so tarnished that the private equity firm likely has one swing at a decent update. Anything less than a homerun and they might as well shut it down.
Since it is a private equity firm, what makes you think they are interested in doing anything other than gutting the business?
I work at a PE-owned company (over 20 years in PE ownership now) and the strategy is to seek growth, not to cut costs by shedding headcount.
Caveats:
1. This is anecdotal evidence, and many PE firms actually do buy companies with the intention of firing people.
2. I don't know whether this is the most common activity or just generates the most press/attention. I would be pretty interested in a statistic that looks at PE company acquisitions and compares company headcount at entry and exit.