Inside Intuit: How the Makers of Quicken Beat Microsoft and Revolutionized an Entire Industry (Hardcover)

by Suzanne Taylor (Author), Kathy Schroeder (Author), John Doerr (Author) "Stanford and Harvard and was accepted by both..." (more)
Key Phrases: automated financial services, business products group, retail launch, Scott Cook, Eric Dunn, Wells Fargo (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"The fast-paced narrative by Suzanne Taylor and Kathy Schroeder provides a candid and entertaining look at Intuit and its founders." -- San Jose Mercury News, 1 February, 2004

Product Description

The Exclusive Story behind Intuit's Hard-Won Success

It's a modern-day David and Goliath story for the business world: a company dreamed up at a kitchen table, built on explosive PC growth, and forced to battle a giant in the race to revolutionize an industry. This is the story of Intuit, creator of renowned software products like Quicken, QuickBooks, and TurboTax-the company that beat mighty Microsoft and changed the way 25 million people manage their finances.

Written by Intuit veteran Suzanne Taylor and seasoned business manager Kathy Schroeder-who were granted exclusive interviews with founder Scott Cook and other key figures- Inside Intuit tells this company's original and fascinating tale for the first time. The book vividly recounts each dramatic stage of Intuit's development: from initial conception to "bet the company" investments; from strokes of marketing genius to disastrous product launches; and from battles for survival to successive victories against arch-rival Microsoft-the company no one else could beat.

Evident throughout this account is the power of Intuit's relentless customer focus, which guided the company from tiny start-up to a 6,000-employee, $1.4 billion business. Instructive and inspiring, Inside Intuit chronicles an enduring company's extraordinary success against overwhelming odds.

"This important book doesn't take any shortcuts in analyzing the building blocks of success. Taylor and Schroeder have written a fascinating blow-by-blow account of the thousand and one decisions that have made Intuit what it is. Highly readable, thorough, and extremely well researched Inside Intuit is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand success in Silicon Valley."

-Emanuel Rosen, author, The Anatomy of Buzz

"Inside Intuit is more than the history of a start-up that grew to dominate a major software category. It is a blueprint of success for entrepreneurs and investors who want to build great businesses in difficult environments."

-Roger McNamee, cofounder, Silver Lake Partners and Integral Capital Partners

"Inside Intuit is a very entertaining book. Any entrepreneur at heart will enjoy and learn from the story of how Scott Cook and Tom Proulx faced so much adversity and came back from the brink of disaster to build a very successful, highly admired Silicon Valley company. Readers can learn many lessons from both Intuit's successes and mistakes. In the end, good ideas, hard work, determination, and strong values really do pay off!"

-Dan Rudolph, Senior Associate Dean/Chief Operating Officer, Stanford Graduate School of Business

"I was thrilled to read the inside story of how Intuit was born and raised. I've always admired Intuit's strict attention to customer needs and feedback. Now I have a much better idea of how that culture was created."

-Stewart Alsop, General Partner, New Enterprise Associates

"Inside Intuit offers readers the secrets behind that company's extraordinary success. The authors' insights into how Intuit trounced Microsoft alone are worth the price of the book!"

-Andrea Butter, coauthor, Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring and the Birth of the Billion Dollar Handheld Industry

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business School Press; First Edition edition (September 4, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591391369
• ISBN-13: 978-1591391364
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #304,976 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Case History of a Continuing Business Model Innovator!, May 1, 2004

By	Professor Donald Mitchell "Jesus Makes Me a P... (Boston) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

How many companies have survived direct battles with Microsoft? Not very many. How many lived to win over direct battles with Microsoft? Even fewer. Intuit is in that elite company. That experience alone would make the book worth considering.

The authors have done an outstanding job of building on that potentially fascinating subject matter by successfully capturing the key elements of how Intuit has continued to succeed as a business model innovator through four CEOs. I was especially pleased to see that the book captures the values that led to this innovation, the organizational and process methods used to stimulate and pursue the innovation, and the motivations of the key innovators.

In addition, the book moves down into the organization to capture the thoughts and emotions of many of the Intuit employees as it moved from its P&G style focus on customer needs to a broad-based expansion through acquisitions to a GE-style disciplined approach to achieve performance in key areas.

In fact, this book was so fine that I had to ask myself what was missing before I could spot any flaws. The only area where the book is a little light is in describing the details of how Intuit's software development changed over time, and what the lessons were. Now, don't mistake my point. There's plenty on that subject (especially when Intuit was a start-up), but there could have been more . . . if this book were to become a case history source on software engineering.

But no book can be everything to everyone, and currently there are few books that explain continuing business model innovation through generations of senior management. So Inside Intuit becomes a must read for those who want to master this critical leadership and management task.

By the way, Inside Intuit is a very apt title. The authors seem to have had unrestrained access to company insiders. The book comes away much richer as a result than any other Silicon Valley saga that I can remember reading. Most of those books focus on one to three people in the company, and leave it at that.

As I finished the book, I wondered what improvements in its continuing business model innovation Intuit will make next. I can hardly wait to find out!

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting read on innovative company, January 6, 2004

By	William McMichael (Audubon, NJ USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Interesting corporate biography on Intuit, which arguably is the most successful consumer software company in the world.
The authors focus on Intuit's core values
1. Integrity
2. Do right by the customers
3. It's the people

It provides entertaining examples where the company did right by customers and did right by its employees. In particular, the authors focus on Intuit's strong customer oriented culture and its extensive user testing to make their software easy to use.
The Intuit story is told chronologically covering Intuit's conception to the present . Probably since the authors have a marketing background, there is a lot of coverage on marketing roll-outs, pricing strategies, and branding. I would have liked to read more on their engineering strategies. This really is limited to stories of engineers pulling all-nighters and a focus on usability testing. Not much insight is given on how they actually develop award winning software. There is interesting management insight to current CEO Bennett, and how he brought more discipline and metric focus to the organization. The authors had access to all of the key Intuit players , and Intuit's vision, mission and operating values statement makes for an insightful read in the appendix.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dotcommers, Read This!, September 25, 2003

By A Customer

Entrepenuers will enjoy this book, especially the predominant theme: Intuit won its market niche by paying attention to the customer -- not just what the customer *says*, but what the customer *does*. Even though Intuit was the 47th entry into the personal finance market, it won the market by carefully attending to the customer's needs.

Even Intuit's missteps were instructive. Customers repeatedly proclaimed that if there were retirement planning software out there, they would use it, but when Intuit provided it, it found that customers, as they do with the more legal aspects of estate planning like wills and trusts, avoid confronting the inevitable.

While not written as dramatically as technology thrillers like Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine,"or Po Bronson's works, "Inside Intuit" benefits from the authors' "inside" experience, and they take the reader to both sides of sometimes contentious inside issues, like the Microsoft/Intuit merger that almost occurred in the mid-1990s, or the lack of success of a CEO in the late 1990s.

I positively recommend this book, not only as an entertaining read, but more importantly, as an instructive one. Former Dotcommers would do well to read why enthusiasm and hard work were not the only requirements for success -- knowing what your customer *needs," and satisfying those needs, is vital, too.