

Intuit Not Out to Change Mint Says Founder - n8agrin
http://www.mint.com/blog/updates/intuit-not-out-to-change-mint-says-founder/

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dkarl
That's what they all say. "We love you, you're perfect, now change." That's
what we heard when the company I work for was purchased by a company with
about five hundred times as many employees. The bigwigs came in and said, "We
bought you because we could never do what you have done. We don't want to
change your culture. You guys are great!" Since then it's been a steady
drumbeat of being forced to use _their_ systems and integrate with _their_
processes. Every time we scrap one of our nice, customized, lightweight
systems or processes and adopt their crappy, heavyweight, generic, unsuitable
processes, our bosses get to take credit for insane amounts of "savings" --
they literally claim we save millions of dollars. So in general they love the
fact that we're different, but when it comes to any of the hundreds of small
differences between us, it is taken for granted that we must conform to their
superior way of doing things.

Leaving us to ask, "Hey guys, what difference will we be allowed to retain?
Can you name _anything_ that we'll be allowed to do differently from you? If
we have to do everything _just like you_ , and you freely admitted that you
could _never do what we do_ , why don't you just get it over with and shut us
down?"

~~~
dkarl
P.S. I just realized another thing: Intuit might have got the shit kicked out
of it by Mint (to borrow a phrase from the 37signals post), but it's safe to
assume that most people at Intuit who competed directly against Mint still
think they were right and Mint was wrong. About everything. Or at least 90% of
everything. Mint got lucky, got better press because of its upstart cool
factor, whatever. And the Intuit guys are determined to prove they were right
by forcing Mint to do things the "right" way.

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nobody_nowhere
Just because they're not planning to change it doesn't mean they won't.

My experience in a small startup acquired by a large multinational is that all
the unintended things -- the processes, procedures, standards, overhead -- add
up to massive unintended change.

Example: we had an integration process between salesforce.com and our core
product underway when we got bought. Sales guys would be able to hit a button
and orders would flow directly into our product for execution -- eliminating
overhead, reducing errors, and improving yield by allowing better forecasting
and delivery.

The large multinational conducted a review, and told us that in order to avoid
running afoul of corporate standards, we'd have to migrate our sales tracking
to SAP, and integrate with SAP instead. The project was put on hold. The hold
grew longer when it turned out that currency issues in the large
multinational's SAP implementation would prevent us from billing certain
foreign customers in their local currency. Then we realized our budget
wouldn't permit us to use this radically more expensive product, and there
wasn't a magic SAP budget out there for us to tap into. A year later, we were
still using salesforce.com, without a connection to our core product.

I'm all in favor of acquisitions, and this will probably be a great thing for
mint -- contrary to (say) the rant from 37signals today. But don't expect that
it's not going to change things.

------
n8agrin
From the article:

 _Following the close of the acquisition, Aaron Patzer and the Mint team will
remain in charge of Mint.com to continue both its principles and its fast pace
of progress.

We’re not planning to change Mint.com and make it like Quicken. Quite the
opposite. Aaron and team will also run Quicken and Quicken.com to ensure this
doesn’t happen. Plus they will benefit from this larger pool of resources. I
want Mint thinking to infuse Quicken._

While the post comes across as genuine, I wonder if by spreading the Mint.com
team thinner, across all the Intuit products, they will really be able to
"...continue both its principles and its fast pace of progress."

~~~
javery
I thought that was weird as well, who want's to run two competing projects?
Quicken Online and Mint are basically direct competitors. Which one do you
spend your time on? When you have a new feature do you put it in both?

~~~
philwelch
Best case scenario for the new Quicken Online:

    
    
      .htaccess:
        Redirect 301 / http://www.mint.com/

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sophacles
This is too bad. I was really hoping that Mint would be able to handle some
things in a slightly sane way now that Intuit was involved. For example: I get
paid $X per month, direct deposit to my savings account. I then transfer $Y to
checking, and $Z to investment accounts (NOTE: not buying investments yet,
just staging it). According to Mint I now have an income of $X+$Y+$Z for the
month, and have spent $Y+$Z. When I by investments that amount also gets added
to both income and expense totals.

It seems to me that doubly entry bookkeeping was invented at least 1000 years
ago, and handles the whole funds transfer thing just fine without misreporting
income. I certainly wish the Mint team could do so as well.

------
curoi
In which Scott Cook demonstrates he still doesn't have a clue.

I'd have to concur with many of the comments on the blog post. I didn't switch
to Mint.com because it was free, or it was the latest shiny product. I may be
young, but I'm not stupid, nor was Mint.com a fad decision. I switched because
Quicken was big ball of a program, with poor support on my platform, a
horrendous upgrade path, and notoriously poor customer service.

I didn't flee Quicken because I was rebelling. I left because I made an
informed consumer decision.

------
edw519
Isn't this exactly what a lot of people wanted to hear?

Disruptive technology is exactly that: disruptive.

We are so used to thinking, "New is good, older _must_ be bad," that we forget
that we can evolve to the "best of both worlds". Some changes take a little
time. Give this baby its 9 months to be born.

