More Layoffs for Intuit as Company Continues Realignment

> "Intuit has had a tough run in recent weeks. Following its earnings report last week, the company’s stock fell sharply."

With the type of week the US and the rest of the world has had in the stock market I think a drop in stock prices should be taken with a grain of salt.

Intuit is in trouble. There are several competing products eating its lunch.

TaxAct is a good example of a competitive alternative to Turbotax. I used to do my taxes with TurboTax, but got tired of the yearly price increases and the movement of useful sections of the 1040 form to higher priced versions. A couple of years ago, I switched to TaxAct which provides everything for 1/5th the cost of the best TurboTax package.

I dumped Quicken 10 years ago due to the incessant upgrade treadmill. I've been using GNUCASH instead. It doesn't have all of the features that Quicken had (e.g. downloading transactions from your financial institutions) but it is free and stable. You have to get used to double entry bookkeeping, but that is a minor obstacle to overcome.

Intuit makes most of their money using regulatory capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture instead of delighting customers. For example, they collude with the Internal Revenue Service and the banking industry to prevent open source alternatives to electronic tax filing and the downloading of bank transactions under the guise of security.

Intuit needs to get back to producing products which are superior to open source alternatives at a nominal cost without using regulatory capture as a key aspect business model.

Intuit has a basketball court and an entire building with random crap everywhere dedicated to "inspiring" employees. It's a symbol of Silicon Valley excess better than anything put on television by HBO. Especially since they are neighbours to Google and constantly in a battle to outbid them to be the coolest company to work for.

I think it's safe to say there's some bloat that could be cut from Intuit.