Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout • Hacker News Board

Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

#31

Post by paulryanrogers » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 12:45 AM UTC

thepangolino wrote: post #6

orionblastar wrote: post #2

Quicken 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.

You touched on something I've always wondered about: what's up with all those different transaction data formats? What's wrong with simple CSv files?

CSV is strictly a single table, so it cannot normalize the data. You can end up with a lot of them or a lot of columns and empty cells.

Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

#32

Post by mathattack » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 12:53 AM UTC

Interesting. 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.

Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

#33

Post by newjersey » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 12:57 AM UTC

1024core wrote: post #30

kilroy123 wrote: post #26

Very interesting. Mint must of been making, a um, mint for inuit. I was always skeptical it was a big money maker for them. This move tells me it is far more profitable.

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.

Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

#34

Post by meritt » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 1:00 AM UTC

kilroy123 wrote: post #26

Very interesting. Mint must of been making, a um, mint for inuit. I was always skeptical it was a big money maker for them. This move tells me it is far more profitable.

You're very correct but not in the way you might think. They are reselling the consumer spending data (timestamps, store/merchant, dollar amounts, demographics about the consumer, etc) to hedge funds, investment banks, and as competitive intelligence to other companies.

Imagine detailed consumer spending for Home Depot & Lowe's for the past few years broken down by market, average purchase size, frequency, churn rate, loyalty, demographics of consumer, financial position of consumer, credit scores, et al. That's huge if you're investing in either company or if you are either company and you want to know how your competition is faring, marketing spend, expansion decisions, etc.

In their earnings they only show direct Mint.com revenue (affiliate traffic from signing up for credit cards, bank accounts, mortgages, etc) which is extremely small compared to the data intelligence. The rest probably shows up in "data services" or something vague.

Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

#35

Post by rblatz » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 1:01 AM UTC

AznHisoka wrote: post #29

kilroy123 wrote: post #26

Very interesting. Mint must of been making, a um, mint for inuit. I was always skeptical it was a big money maker for them. This move tells me it is far more profitable.

I'd wager acquiring mint was one of their worst decisions ever. A product that's losing popularity year after year and a pain to maintain technically too. Wouldn't be surprised if they shutdown the product in a year.

No buying mint and then basically freezing the product was their worst decision.

Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

#36

Post by nightski » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 1:09 AM UTC

MajorLOL wrote: post #10

flog wrote: post #5

All looking pretty good for cloud accounting products like Xero.com - the desktop is dead!

Honestly, is this a good thing? I run quickbooks for a small business - if I wanted a Xero equivalent, I have to pay $70/mo?! That's crazy!

It's true. They are trying so hard to push Quickbooks online too. But no, I am just fine with my 2014 QB Pro thank you very much.

Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

#37

Post by thorntonbf » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 1:10 AM UTC

Intuit 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.

Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

#38

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 1:10 AM UTC

georgeglue1 wrote: post #22

flog wrote: post #5

All looking pretty good for cloud accounting products like Xero.com - the desktop is dead!

I mean, Intuit has moved its core accounting products to the cloud a while ago as well right? I'm not sure I understand how Xero is connected to Quicken-type services.

[deleted]

Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

#39

Post by Karunamon » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 1:12 AM UTC

isomorphic wrote: post #15

I'm just not going to put all of my financial records in once place under one vendor in the cloud. On the other hand, I'm not going to trust Quicken after years of neglect and no sane way of getting my data out. I used GnuCash for a few years, and was generally satisfied with many parts of it, yet it was horribly broken in some ways. And it isn't easy to get data out, even though it can use a native XML storage forma…

Re: Getting your data out, Quicken has supported OFX and CSV import/export since at least the 90's, and it's enough of an industry standard that any other place you take your data will support the same.

Re: Intuit sells Quicken to private equity firm in management buyout

#40

Post by cobalt » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 1:19 AM UTC

timberburn wrote: post #23

sandmansandine wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack's desktop client is really just Electron I believe

That's the direction consumer desktop apps should move. Cheaper to develop, maintain, update, etc.

that's arguable