It’s been just over a month since news broke that Intuit, makers of Quicken budgeting software and Turbo Tax, would buy Mint.com for $170 million.
Some of Mint’s 1.5 million customers took to blogs and Twitter to complain about the deal and threaten to close their accounts.
About 1,500 to 2,000 customers did jump ship, said Aaron Patzer, Mint’s CEO, most within two days of the acquisition announcement.
Intuit CEO Brad Smith has a pretty stark view on the prospects for a near-term turn in the economy: he doesn’t think a recovery is likely the before the end of the company’s July 2010 fiscal year.
One might think that the recession would compel people to file their tax returns earlier. Who couldn’t use the extra cash? But it turns out that Americans have never filed later.
That’s according to a man who knows something about taxes: Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit, which makes the popular TurboTax software. “Technology makes it easier to wait later,” Smith said in a recent interview.
As recently as late 2008, Pandora Networks’ Chief Technology Officer Tom Conrad still had big doubts about the prospects for smartphone maker Palm. In November, Conrad was among a coterie of software developers invited to Palm headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., to take an early, up-close look at an operating system for use in the company’s phones. “I was totally skeptical when I walked in,” says Conrad, who met Palm execs along with representatives of MySpace, Intuit, movie site Fandango, and Epocrates, a maker of mobile software for physicians.
Moves by major tech companies to open up to outside developers have been a boon for small start-ups. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Yahoo, Apple and Intuit, to name a few, all allow developers to build software that hooks into their services.
Expressing caution on the software sector heading into second quarter earnings report, Goldman Sachs software analysts Sarah Friar, Sasa Zorovic, Derek Bingham and Frederick Grieb this morning chopped estimates on a host of software companies. They also cut their ratings on both Intuit (INTU) and Digital River (DRIV) to Sell from Neutral.
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