Intuit tries to call Mint's bluff? Is this normal? | Hacker News Reader

Intuit tries to call Mint's bluff? Is this normal?

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86 pointsauston61 comments

One of the best days I've had since starting my current company has been receiving an email from a C-level at our largest competitor, pointing out a flaw in the product comparison table on our website (due to the fact that they had released a new version that added one of the features we had that they didn't). I imagine the guys at Mint must have been downright giddy receiving this letter.

On another note...Whenever I get into a conversation about a business I wish I'd started, Mint is the first one that comes to mind. It's such a huge market, and Intuit has failed so miserably to make the transition to the web--and if they ever admit that the web is a better way to solve this problem, they'll have to accept dramatically lower per-user revenue, which is something that very few companies have the balls to do. It's why the tech industry has massive churn every 10-20 years--market leaders get eaten from the bottom (mainframes by minis, minis by micros, etc. for example).

"market leaders get eaten from the bottom"

Textbook Innovator's Dilemma.

Yeah, you'd think somebody at Intuit would have read it.

But, even with the knowledge of the problem, seeing it in your own industry, and recognizing it when you're facing it and before it's too late, seems to be almost impossible. I suspect Intuit are beginning to get a feel for the weight of the problem they face, but I suspect their solution will be ill-conceived. They'll keep chugging away on "integrating" their desktop product with their web product, finding "synergy", and providing "more value" to their existing customer base...all the while that customer base flakes off bit by bit and lands right on Mint's plate. By the time Quicken has a credible web-based version, Mint will already be a more capable product and Intuit will be milking their tiny market share into the grave (there will probably also be a lawsuit or two, which they will lose).

"Textbook Innovator's Dilemma."

"Yeah, you'd think somebody at Intuit would have read it."

At the last "leadership conference" at Intuit, Brad Smith the CEO and other "leaders" were quoting Christensen every 10 minutes or so. A bunch of managers even got some face time with Christensen and the resulting videos were "cascaded" down to the peons in Bangalore.

fwiw. :-D

One of the sadder examples for me is Polaroid, they were doing some strong work in digital imaging but supposedly it didn't receive internal support because "it would undermine our film business". It's one thing to turn a blind eye to upstart innovation, it's another to intentionally stifle it within a company.

Any examples of companies that have done this right? Succeeded at replacing their own obsolete technology with upstart technology?

Apple is really good at this. They are always willing to obsolete their products if there is something else better. A great example is the iPhone. They didn't care that it would cannibalize iPod sales, because they knew the iPhone was the next move. If they didn't do it, someone eventually would shrewdly combine music + phone and beat them to the punch. By trying to constantly out do themselves, and make a better "iPod", they stay ahead of the curve, and make sure the sales always come back to Apple.

Steve Jobs is a big advocate of this. In hindsight it seems so obvious, but most companies just don't get it.

My dad once told me (in a business context; otherwise this would sound kind of weird): "If you're going to get destroyed, you want to own the means of your own destruction." It makes sense to me, but maybe that's easy to say as a student and hard to say as an executive with shareholders.

I suspect that the shareholders, by and large, are pretty happy with the "owning" part; I am guessing that it's your Senior Vice President of Polaroid for Organic Chemistry Research you have to worry about.

It's easy to say as an executive too. Just hard to do. Any music exec will tell you "We need to own music distribution on the internet." But it's hard for an organization to actually work on two goals at once when those goals are

1. Crush the new business model

2. Make the new business model your own

You have different parts of the same company working against each other, and that either poisons the environment or everyone ends up favoring one side over the other.

Seems funny to talk about IBM in this context but they did start out making punch cards in 1896. They successfully made the transition to computers, mainframes, and then PCs, but then finally missed the shift from hardware to software. From about 1896-1980 they were pretty on the ball, though.

Also AT&T has made the transition from fixed to cell phones, okay so far.

It's a lot easier when the new business has the same business model but new technology. When the business model changes along with the technology, often the established company doesn't view change as "profitable enough" and decides to fight the future. If you're curious about this "The Innovator's Dilemma" is a really good book.

Them missing the shift to software wasn't for lack of trying. They had lots of mainframe software, and then had a huge division making PC applications software in the eighties, which no one much liked. Then they made a major push with OS/2 and forked DOS from Microsoft, and bought Lotus. Unfortunately for them, for some reason IBM didn't seem to be able to make mainstream software that people wanted to buy.

The trickiest shift is the business model. IBM could always sell software to corporations. They never managed to sell software to consumers.

"Also AT&T has made the transition from fixed to cell phones, okay so far."

Actually, no. AT&T Wireless blew themselves up with a epic botched software upgrade, and was sold to Cingular at a heavy discount. (Who has since been rebranded AT&T after a complex series of mergers and acquisitions.)

Woz brought the personal computer to HP, for nothing, and they turned it down. Another shining example of vision failure (and from a company that had historically been a leader in everything they did).

I don't know if it's normal, but it's certainly an unbelievably fucking dumb marketing move; your dad knows Quicken, but might not have known about Mint --- until Quicken made sure he did.

Not really. If your dad doesn't know about Mint, chances are he definitely doesn't know TechCrunch either.

Intuit's charade was only seen by a certain demography of users, that by and large does not include Quicken-only users.

Nevertheless, silly move by Intuit, I agree.

I'm a geek, a business owner, a dad and a Quickbooks user. I've known about Mint for a long time but never seriously considered using them ... until now.

What should really scare Quicken is that I could actually see paying $5-$10/mo to use Mint. With 17 accounts and over a year's worth of data I've found it more convenient to use than any Quicken solution. I could never get all my accounts to sync in any of Quicken's products.

It would be brilliant if Intuit is planning on buying mint...

It would be brilliant if they've already secretly signed a deal to buy. If they are just planning on buying, then this would just drive up the price they have to pay Mint's shareholders.

I didn't know about Mint, but have often wished for something exactly like it.

I do my banking with a very small local bank -- it has maybe 4 branches total! -- and was amazed to see it listed in Mint. Yay Mint!

Thank you, Intuit.

What about those boxes of Quicken rotting in the shelves of resellers/customers - doesn't Intuit count them as sold copies even if the software was never used?

They'll count them as sold copies as soon as the money is in.

Buyer != user

Depends who is the buyer. If it's the store then Intuit will definitely account for them as purchased. I don't know how it works in shrink-wrap software retail, but in most retail situations products are bought wholesale by the store, not lent on consignment until the end-user purchases them.

My point was that intuit will have recieved money for the product. So they can honestly say that it was sold. They don't claim that buyers actually use it. (though in order to keep up sales in the long run, they probably strive for that)

I can just picture a large board room at Intuit of stuffy suits all sitting around baffled how this tiny startup is managing to totally dominate them. I'm going to sign up for Mint right now.

Fun fact: A safer way a company can brag in advertising is called "puffing" http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/puffing

As the old saying goes: If you're worth suing then you might be doing something right.

I love how Mint's reply to Intuit says "Hey, we're actually growing faster than you think" and ends with an overt advertisement of Mint's services.

The reason Mint is doing so well is quite simple: it's so damn easy to use.

I just signed up now, and I was expecting to have to go through a number of loops to get it to grab the data from my multiple bank accounts, but it was a breeze. Just another step in the sign-on procedure - truly great work on minimizing the number of people that default from linking their bank accounts.

And the UI is goal-oriented with a deep understanding of common tasks people want. I saw my transactions and renamed one of them..... and was about to groan how stupid this going to be, renaming everything else to match, when I saw the "rename all other instances of xxx always" option. I was floored.

Great work, Mint!

Everyone, pay attention here. Mint doesn't have any technology. They're just an unbelievably well-designed front end for Yodlee.

"[T]he UI is goal-oriented with a deep understanding of common tasks people want". Is your site doing the same?

Is that why they can make dubious security/privacy claims like:

Mint uses only your account login credentials for access to your account information and Mint does not store these credentials.

Clearly that information needs to be stored somewhere, but Mint can make it sound to the users that it is magically not stored (because it's technically not stored by Mint).

I haven't actually used the service. I have a general aversion to services that ask me for my password to a 3rd party account. The import-your-contacts types are bad enough, but bank account access is just too much for me to potentially give up.

Maybe not a bad division, from a business model perspective. Some companies are better at developing the "tech", that then can be licensed to multiple user facing companies whose expertise is customer relationships and UI.

But the risk for the back end company is that the user facing company owns the customer relationship. It is probably easier for them to replace the tech than for the tech company to replace the customer relationships.

I love mint. I actually caught fraud on my credit card while checking my balances on my iPhone through mint's app while at work. I was thinking of writing them a thank you letter.

I would have been tempted to reply something like this:

"At Mint, we have an algorithm to calculate the number of users we have. This function is defined as follows:

mint users = (average logins during the past 7 business days / (registrations - closed accounts)^last business day's S&P 500 closing price - average rainfall of the Amazon basin during the past 6 months[in inches]) * 0 + number of Intuit customers ^ 2

As you can see, here at Mint we may have even underestimated the number of users we have"

I actually caught fraud on my credit card while checking my balances on my iPhone through mint's app while at work.

Don't you read the charges on your statement before you pay it?

I caught an accidental double charge when checking my balances on my iPhone through mint's app while at work.

I use auto bill-pay, but the bill wasn't due for two weeks anyway.

Is it fraud if it's accidental??

Philosophy aside: who cares?

I caught it early and corrected it before it was a problem. That kicks ass in my book.

I do that but Mint is immediate

Of course I do, but I was able to find it right away and report it, instead of going over my entire month's transactions and identifying which were mine and which weren't. Mint was a tool of convenience to me.

As you are no doubt aware, all advertising claims must be verified and substantiated before they are used in advertising.

Now that's a novel idea. Nine out of ten doctors agree.

Sure, but nobody said you had to say what the other 90 doctors you asked thought.

Why would Mint even respond to a letter like that? I could understand if, say, it were a reporter asking, but what right does a competitor have to demand such figures? Let alone so rudely.

Though I suppose if the competition is determined to make themselves look like assholes, furnishing a polite reply and then leaking the whole thing isn't a bad way to help them out.

Hmm, I suppose if someone wanted to be truly a dick to quicken, they could have the publicly available figures printed onto a large billboard (the ones that go on the back of trucks) and park it in front of intuit's HQ.

That's one way to present the info :)

That's funny, but it would be a big mistake. If they start acting arrogantly themselves, people will say "they're no better" and they'll lose the advantage of the contrast. The last thing to do when experiencing success is flaunt it and act entitled.

I signed up sometime last week to check it out, and my six-digit bank account ID numbers in Mint's database are 6079xx and 6079xx+1. They're sequential, so there are 600,000ish rows in the table, but that's not necessarily proof that they're all active.

I don't use Mint for anything really, but technically I'm a user.

Mint's user data is sharded across multiple DB's. So if you're the first user on a fresh DB, your bank account will have ID 1. Also, users usually have multiple bank accounts as well, so accountId isn't a good indicator of # of users.

If you've used both Quickbooks Online and Mint, it's no surprise at all that Mint is doing so well. Mint just blows it out of the water in terms of UI, features, and ease of use.

I've used both Quickbooks online and Mint and as much as I agree with you on interface, I must completely disagree on features. I wish I could use Mint but after trying it out there are several showstopper issues. Just one example, Mint lacks the ability to import or even manually enter past transactions so it's really useless if you want to get all of 2008 in there.

Exactly. Without the ability to enter in other transactions (for example for cash), Mint is just read only. It's a great and useful read only view of your finances, but there's little other functionality.

I wonder if this was some kind of botched overture for a sort of partnership.

That happens more frequently than you think. I was once 'sued' by a F500 company for exactly that purpose, a 'softening up' round before negotiations.

So annoying we don't have mint in Australia I hate doing the finances manually.

Is anyone here able to describe how their interface to your bank account works in more detail? I haven't heard a great explanation of it.

Part of me is still amazed that many people have happily typed in their banking passwords.

There really isn't an interface. Mint uses your login to get the state of your accounts but does not allow you to transfer money or anything else, it is read only. Then it tried to catagorize all the transactions you have based off their database of companies. You can track your spending over time in different categories. It sounds like nothing but unifying all your accounts in one place is very useful.

Why use mint? Why not register with yodlee directly?

Better interface.

Mint is lightweight and has a nicer UI, but Yodlee has more features and can track more types of accounts. I have both set up and find myself using Mint more often.

Because I've never heard of Yodlee. I assume most folks haven't either...Mint isn't exactly a household name, but they've obviously done a better job marketing themselves to consumers than Yodlee.

Yodlee powers Mint, many online banking sites, etc. Mint is an advanced skin on-top of Yodlee. Yodlee is not a consumer brand.

Quicken online is really, really bad. They should have acquired Mint at least 12 months ago.

Maybe it's just me, but this article felt a lot like something I would see on valleywag. Just replace tech companies with tech individuals.

There is, of course, shallow technical discussion about how users are counted; even a comScore chart; but the tone of the article and the ludicrousness of the whole affair felt no less voyeuristic.

so I can just email any company and demand them to give out their proprietary data? Mint should have told them to go to hell.

This is essentially data Mint publishes on its front page, and has mentioned in press releases before. I don't think that really qualifies as proprietary.

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