Mint.com to be purchased by Intuit; Aaron Patzer to move over as GM, Personal Finance

This from Aaron Patzer today:

As out­lined in today’s press release and my blog post, after the acqui­si­tion closes, the Mint.com team will con­tribute to improv­ing the finan­cial lives of tens of mil­lions of con­sumers and small busi­nesses. I’ll per­son­ally be tak­ing on the role of GM of Intuit’s Per­sonal Finance group respon­si­ble for online, desk­top and mobile con­sumer per­sonal finance offer­ings. Join­ing Intuit enables us to bring our vision of help­ing con­sumers under­stand and do more with their money to mil­lions of Intuit cus­tomers. This is a com­pelling com­bi­na­tion of our inno­v­a­tive prod­uct, tech­nol­ogy, and indus­try lead­ing user inter­face design with one of the most trusted brands in software.

This is good news for Intuit — not sure they can get any more dis­or­ga­nized than they are now. It’s prob­a­bly good news for Mint, though they’re hitch­ing their wagon to a brand that needs des­per­ate help, putting them­selves in the posi­tion of float­ing qual­ity for both brands.

I left Quicken this year after being a user for over a decade. The soft­ware is less sta­ble than it was when I joined the Intuit band­wagon and there is lit­tle evi­dence of evo­lu­tion or rig­or­ous devel­op­ment over time. In fact, sev­eral of the fea­tures I used reg­u­larly in those early ver­sions have been taken out of the soft­ware today. I’ve moved to Mon­ey­Well and have been able to make a remark­ably easy tran­si­tion to the package.