intuit

The defeat of Microsoft Money at the hands of Intuit's Quicken marks a rare chapter in the annals of software history.

Intuit is one of the few companies to take Microsoft head-on on its home turf--packaged software--and come out on top. Even more notably, Intuit has managed to do it several times, with Quicken of course, but also with QuickBooks and TurboTax.

Of course, it was more than just Intuit's success that led to Money's demise, which CNET News first reported on Wednesday. The product was ultimately doomed by several factors, including a shift away from packaged … Read more

Microsoft plans to stop selling Microsoft Money, its venerable, but not market-leading personal finance program, CNET News has learned.

The software maker has been notifying financial institutions and plans to announce the move to customers over the next 24 hours via a posting on its Web site and a notification in the software. Although Microsoft will stop selling the product at the end of June, it plans to support it through January 2011.

After that point, people can continue to use the product, but they will no longer be able to get automated data feeds from their banks, credit card … Read more

This was originally published at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

IBM on Tuesday announced a pact with Intuit for an integrated server that's designed to be a small to midsized business IT department in a box. The appliance, dubbed the Smart Cube, is designed to offer e-mail, calendaring, security, finance, and other enterprise apps out of the box.

In many respects, IBM's Smart Cube emulates Apple's model with the iPod. The big pitch is to integrate software and hardware (iPod, Mac) in a tight package with a marketplace (iTunes). Big Blue's Smart Cube is lumped into … Read more

With billions in stimulus dollars available to help doctors and hospitals digitize their health records, it stands to reason that tech companies want to make spending that money as easy as possible.

Several of the players--Allscripts, Cisco, Citrix, Dell, Intel, Intuit, Microsoft, and Nuance Communications--have teamed up in an alliance aimed at educating doctors on the many tools available to help set up electronic health records.

The EHR Stimulus Alliance is pulling out all the stops, with a road tour, Webcasts, telephone hotline, and other tools all aimed at demystifying the technology and showing case studies of where it has … Read more

Intuit has just released a handy, free iPhone app to accompany its free online financial service, Quicken Online.

Unlike the software version of Quicken, a feature-laden financial management app, Quicken Online and its Quicken Online Mobile companion app (get it here--iTunes store link) are really only designed to help you get a view into your cash flow. The main screen of Quicken Online Mobile shows you how much cash you have access to before your next payday, and it shows how you're doing against any monthly budget numbers you have set up.

You can also add new cash … Read more

BumpTop replaces your desktop with a visual environment unlike any you've used. It's a bit like a futuristic gesture-based interface, but it's tied to your mouse. Were it capable of simultaneous Web browsing, its utility would be much more apparent.

BumpTop makes the items on your computer's desktop more like their real-world counterparts. Icons and folders are assigned a virtual weight based on the amount of memory they take up and their importance to you. You can move them by click-and-drag, or fling them across the BumpTop space. The program determines their importance based on how … Read more

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Intuit delivered second-quarter results that illustrate that it is recession-resistant, but a lot of the game plan revolves around cost cutting and innovating in a downturn. The rub: Intuit CEO Brad Smith doesn't consider the economic landscape a downturn per se, but a "new normal."

On the company's earnings conference call (statement), Smith said:

Now clearly we have seen some fundamental changes in the economy in the recent months. These changes have only bolstered my confidence that we are on the right path. We don't … Read more

Finding your way to the right tax-prep program is almost as complicated as doing the taxes themselves.

In this First Look video, we'll walk you through the pros and cons of the superpopular tax-prep programs TaxCut (by H&R Block) and TurboTax (by Intuit.) The differences between them add up to more than just looks and cost.