Four months after Intuit bought personal finance Web site Mint.com, the company is preparing to phase out its Quicken Online software, moving Intuit’s Web users to Mint. The software company plans to combine its technology with Mint’s, making it easier for users to toggle between the Web and their home computers while managing money.
Intuit plans to discontinue Quicken Online, its Web-based money management product, sometime between April and June, and move those users to Mint.com, Intuit Vice-President and Mint founder Aaron Patzer says in an e-mail. Patzer was expanding on comments he had made in an interview for the NBC Bay Area program Press: Here.
“Quicken Online will be end-of-lifed in the next few months,” Patzer said on the program. “We’ll transition those users over to Mint.com,” while preserving their historical financial data, Patzer’s remarks indicate that Intuit is moving swiftly to reshape its software to more closely resemble the Web-based service that gained users at such a brisk clip that it started threatening Intuit’s dominance of the personal finance software market. Patzer had hinted at the plans in an early December blog entry.
In the on-air discussion, Patzer said Intuit plans to keep selling desktop versions of Quicken for Windows PCs and Apple Macs for perhaps five years further. That’s mainly to appeal to “older” users who “feel more comfortable” with their finances on a personal computer, he said. Within about two years, the company plans to combine the software code of Mint.com and Quicken into a product that would let users readily switch between desktop and online modes.
Will Older Quicken Users Adapt?
Patzer said he and his team from Mint have been given lots of leeway to shape Intuit’s personal finance products. “They want to learn more from us than us from them,” he said.
The Mint team possesses the necessary “intellectual…