Gordon's Notes: What killed Intuit's Quicken?
Gordon's:
Gordon's Notes: What killed Intuit's Quicken?: Yes, you can still buy something called "Quicken" for Windows…. No matter, Quicken is dead. The failure to produce a reasonable product for OS X is just another nail in the coffin. Intuit itself may well continue. Their share price has done well over the past two years, and the company has moved well beyond their original product line. They may even be earning money (one way or another) from Intuit's Mint.com, a read-only Cloud product with a few cough privacy and security issues
It's not just Quicken. Back in the 80s and 90s personal financial software was a hot product niche…. So what happened to personal financial software?…. This would be my guess...
The banks stopped cooperating…. The ability to visit web sites and find current investment values was sufficient for a significant fraction of Intuit's customer base. The American middle class fragmented as wealth concentrated in less than 1% of the US population.
The last of these is, of course, the most interesting.
Quicken is not an interesting product for people with millions of dollars to manage…. Quicken is not an interesting product for people with very limited savings and investments, particularly if the investments are largely concentrated in 401K accounts. The natural market for Quicken was individuals and families with significant financial complexity but not wealth.
Over the past fifteen years that market went away…. In the end, I think the collapse of the American middle class killed Quicken.
