Posts Tagged ‘open source’

The Evolving Intuit

I’ve been noticing lately a great trend in Intuit that I never would have expected from the company. Sometime last month, Intuit announced support for the iPhone on its online service. I tried out the demo on my iPod Touch and it looks great. Quickbooks has historically been a mostly Windows vendor with very crippled versions of its software that run on Mac. In fact, at work we have one Windows desktop and a Windows virtual machine just because certain features weren’t available for the Mac software. I then read posts on their press releases about potential Linux support. Then, I found a link to thelinux411.com and almost fell off my chair. A website dedicated to Linux owned by Intuit?

So far, Intuit’s support for Linux seems like all smoke and mirrors since I was unable to find a link to information on any actual Quickbooks software that would run on Linux, but things are looking much better. As Robin Miller mentions in his Linux.com article, Intuit would do well on the Linux platform. Microsoft is starting to compete directly with Intuit with their accounting software and Microsoft wouldn’t even stand a chance on Linux. Also, as mentioned in the article, a lot of open source shops such as the company I work for, would switch and probably wouldn’t look for any other software if Quickbooks was able to run on Linux.

I am currently working in a hosting company, but came from a very heavy background so immediately my wheels started turning. One of the biggest things we struggled with when recommending Linux solutions to clients was the lack of support for a lot of software which included Quickbooks to a great extent. Quickbooks would definitely be very welcomed to the Linux platform, but a much better way to bring OS agnosticism to the software would be a SaaS model. Intuit is already part of the way there with their online offerings, but a hosted model could bring them into an even larger market with a lower up-front investment for customers and a broader OS support base.

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Filed under News, Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Aug 26th, 2008