Last fall, I posted my reaction to Intuit acquiring Mint.com online personal finance software. My concern was that while Intuit makes some great software, they have been out of touch with a large portion of personal finance software users over the last few years. Although Intuit’s Quicken desktop software has many strong points, there have been times when, in my opinion, piling more cool-but-unnecessary features into Quicken took precedence fixing bugs that remained from one version to the next.
Image by LuMaxArt / BigStockPhoto.com
I am cautiously reversing my opinion for now. It seems like Patzer is having more of an influence on the Quicken team at Intuit than Intuit is having on him (and this is a good thing). Mint continues to be an awesome web app, superior to Quicken Online. When Quicken Online and Mint are combined into one later this year, I think the new online software will essentially be Mint beefed up with the ability to download financial data from the hundreds or thousands more financial institutions that Quicken supports (this is a great thing). I like Patzer’s transparency with his customer base. He tells it like it is, informing the public that “Mint will do X, but it won’t do Z, and that is the way it is for now”.
I think Patzer is showing Intuit/Quicken that it’s better to provide a kick-ass product or service that simply works vs. scrambling to develop the latest ‘whistles and bells’ to keep customers. Quicken has a great opportunity to turn things around. I would like to see this transformation take place with the desktop software as well – take a year or two off from adding stuff to Quicken desktop and refine it into something simple yet powerful. Make it so Quicken desktop” just works”, and when bugs appear, don’t pretend they don’t exist. Don’t patronize the customer, but acknowledge the problem, then fix it even if it take a year to get it right.
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