Intuit Not Out to Change Mint Says Founder

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?"

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.