MinTuit: What’s Next After the Intuit / Mint Deal
Business, SaaS September 14th, 2009
TechCrunch50 could not have asked for a better start: they get to announce that personal finance startup Mint winner of the $50K grand prize @ TC50 two years ago just got acquired for $170M.
Great exit for a startup – not so sure about concerned users. But the big question today is why it made sense for Intuit and what the future holds for Mint and its users. The consensus is that first of all this has been a defensive move. Mint started to bite into the Intuit / Quicken pie, and Intuit just had to stop it.
There is some irony in this deal: the playbook had been written by Microsoft, against Intuit.
Continue reading …
Tags: acquisitions, aggregation, benchmarking, data mining, intuit, intumint, mergers, microsoft, Microsoft Money, mint, mintuit, money management., MS Money, Online Banking, personal finance, PFM, quickbooks, quicken, SaaS, Wesabe, xref
This is a shameless reprint of my post exactly two months ago:
Yahoo running to AOL to avoid assimilation by the (Micro-)Borg? Hm… I don’t know which one is worse. (Actually, I do.) The funny (actually, sad) thing is, most of my Best MicroHoo quotes apply to a Yahoo/AOL situation, you just have to replace Microsoft with AOL
Personally, I think the Microsoft and Yahoo matchup is like two tired swimmers who bump into each other and then wind up drowning each other in their scramble to survive. But Yahoo will be the first to go under in this embrace.
It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.
Imagine a circus act in which two enormous, clumsy, awkward elephants that don’t really like each other are supposed to mate while riding on skateboards.
Oh, well… a sad soap opera. 
Related posts (a few of the many): Silicon Alley Insider, TechCrunch, BoomTown, BloggingStocks, Technology news, Tech Beat, HipMojo.com, Deal Journal, Mark Evans, TECH.BLORGE.com, BuzzMachine , MarketingVOX
Tags: acquisition, aol, feke steve jobs, fsj, Humor, mergers, microsoft, yahoo
Yahoo running to AOL to avoid assimilation by the (Micro-)Borg? Hm… I don’t know which one is worse. (Actually, I do.) The funny (actually, sad) thing is, most of my Best MicroHoo quotes apply to a Yahoo/AOL situation, you just have to replace Microsoft with AOL
Personally, I think the Microsoft and Yahoo matchup is like two tired swimmers who bump into each other and then wind up drowning each other in their scramble to survive. But Yahoo will be the first to go under in this embrace.
It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.
Imagine a circus act in which two enormous, clumsy, awkward elephants that don’t really like each other are supposed to mate while riding on skateboards.
Oh, well… a sad soap opera.
Tags: acquisition, aol, feke steve jobs, fsj, Humor, mergers, microsoft, yahoo
The Best MicroHoo Quotes
Business, Software February 3rd, 2008
There’s hardly anything new to add to the MSFT/YHOO story, except two great quotes.
Personally, I think the Microsoft and Yahoo matchup is like two tired swimmers who bump into each other and then wind up drowning each other in their scramble to survive. But Yahoo will be the first to go under in this embrace.
It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.
Now, for the best part: this last one isn’t from FSJ, after all.. it’s from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer himself. (that is if you can believe anything a blog with Fake in the title says)
Ballmer said he loved when his rivals merged, because whenever the also-rans in any market start teaming up they might as well be waving a white flag. Because it’s over. You’ve beaten them. You’ve driven them to despair. They haven’t been able to beat you on their own; there’s no way they’ll do it together. Then he told me that line about the hundred-yard dash.
Btw, this Fake Steve post is not exactly short of great metaphors. Here’s one describing the post-merger integration (you know, the stage where all mergers fail):
Imagine a circus act in which two enormous, clumsy, awkward elephants that don’t really like each other are supposed to mate while riding on skateboards.
and this one:
That giant buzzing sound you hear is the whirring of photocopiers in Redmond revving up and spitting out resumes.
It’s worth reading in full.
Update (2/4): Robert Scoble’s version: Put two turkeys together and you don’t get an eagle.
Tags: acquisition, feke steve jobs, fsj, Humor, mergers, microsoft, yahoo
Betting on the NetSuite IPO
Business, ERP / CRM, Enterprise Software, SMB / SME, SaaS, Software, Technology December 6th, 2006
(Updated)
Phil Wainewright at ZDNet is running a poll on whether NetSuite will have a chance to go ahead with the long-awaited IPO or it will get folded back into the Empire.
I’m somewhat surprised by the above results, but since this is an early snapshot, please check the live poll for the current vote count.
Surprise or not, acquisition by Oracle is a realistic scenario, considering Larry Ellison’s close to 60% stake in NetSuite. This is certainly fellow Enterprise Irregular Jason Wood’s take.
I tend to believe that NetSuite is better off being an independent business; there are just too many differences for a merger to work well, and I don’t mean only technical, product-related differences. NetSuite is still largely a small business (SMB) player, and that’s a market that requires an entirely different Sales and Marketing approach, amongst others, and Oracle with it’s current “legacy” salesforce just can’t reach this market profitably. If your products are different, your target market is different, your organization, corporate culture are different, where’s the synergy? Big behemoth Oracle would kill NetSuite – Larry is better off with a portfolio approach, cashing in a 10-digit return
Talk about the SMB market – there really is no such thing. “SMB” was sufficient to describe the market to avoid, but now that the software industry is getting ready to actually address the needs of this segment, it’s too heterogeneous to be lumped together.A $100M business is just as different from a ten-person startup as it is from a Fortune 1000 company. When analysts talk about SMB, they really have the mid-market in mind; when SAP is announcing new SMB initiatives, it targets $100-$200M companies.
The forgotten “long tail” represents a huge untapped opportunity: millions of (very) small businesses that can now directly be reached, sold to, serviced inexpensively over the Net – classic SaaS style. Different markets require different organizations – NetSuite serves this segment much better than Oracle (or SAP, for that matter) ever could. In fact SAP would be wise to copy this chapter from Ellison’s book: it should get it’s own “NetSuite” by investing in (not acquiring) an up-and-coming small-business focused All-in-One SaaS provider, like European 24SevenOffice. The next NetSuite.
Update (12/11): NetSuite Gets Ready For Its Close-Up by BusinessWeek.
Update (12/19): TechCrunch is running a story titled NetSuite’s Going Public, Looking for $1 Billion Valuation. I don’t know if it’s based on new information or …. (?)
Tags: 24sevenoffice, acquisitions, all-in-one, crm, erp, ipo, ipo market, irregulars, m&a, mergers, netsuite, On-Demand, oracle, SaaS, sap, smb, sme, vsb
Zoli Erdos
