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Inside Intuit: How the Makers of Quicken Beat Microsoft and Revolutionized an Entire Industry
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Author: Suzanne Taylor, Kathy Schroeder, John Doerr
List Price: $29.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 1591391369
Publisher: Harvard Business School Press (04 September, 2003)
Edition: Hardcover
Sales Rank: 19,038
Average Customer Rating: 4.75 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 4 out of 5
Interesting read on innovative company
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 peopleIt 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.
Rating: 5 out of 5
This Book Wows
I have read a number of corporate biographies and this one has to rank near the top. The authors describe many of the company's failures and successes in a forthright manner. Also, their technique of discussing the company in terms of its several regimes is a very useful way of thinking about the company's evolution. My one complaint is that I don't think the book adequately describes the company's present and future; for instance, there is no mention of the Siebel implementation that is a huge deal internally, the efforts in leveraging the accountants as a channel, or the impending battle with MSFT in the Small Biz arena. There is a lack of description of the daily life at Intuit- the Friday beer fests (Karl Strauss beer!), employee bonding at the foosball tables, the yearly golf tournament, the one office per employee policy, opportunities to pick Steve Bennett's brain at quarterly web broadcasts anonymously.. the list goes on- that makes Intuit a Great Place to Work.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Intuit: From a Vision to a Reality
Inside Intuit is an accurate story of the evolution
of Intuit. From the time that Scott Cook came up
with the vision that Quicken would change the way
people did their finances through today, Inside
Intuit captures the essential details of how Intuit
went from a small Silicon Valley start-up and grew
into a multi-billion dollar company. As a former
Intuit employee for nine years, it was exciting to
relive the experience. Taylor and Schroeder did a
wonderful job putting the pieces together to make
Inside Intuit a great read.
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