September 14th, 2009
Intuit's reported purchase of Mint: A fine defensive move
Intuit will reportedly acquire Mint.com, squashing any potential threat from a much ballyhooed startup.
TechCrunch reports that Intuit will buy Mint.com in a deal valued at around $170 million.
Mint is a financial management site that has landed a bevy of followers. A lot of Mint’s users see the service as a more intuitive version of Intuit’s Quicken. Simply put, Mint is the new Quicken to its converts.
Sam Diaz is a big fan of Mint and it’s not hard to find supporters of the site. I’ve resisted largely because I generally don’t aggregate my financial accounts with startups.
So what do you do if you’re the leading personal finance player (Intuit) and you see a potential threat far on the horizon? You buy it.
Intuit’s move makes a ton of sense from a defensive standpoint, but when I see these deals I always have a mixed reaction. Wouldn’t it be far more interesting to see whether Mint could become Intuit 2.0? We’ll never find out now. Defensive acquisitions are just the normal course of business—Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft have all acquired potential threats—but just once I’d love to see these potential competitors on the horizon get a little bigger just to see the competition play out.
More:
- Mint.com offers close-to-home peek at economy’s impact
- Mint.com starts keeping an eye on your budget
- Intuit unveils mobile phone credit card processing
- Mint.com brings personal finance to the iPhone
- Intuit launches open source community
- Webware 100 winner: Mint
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
For daily updates, follow Larry on Twitter.
Subscribe to Between the Lines via Email alerts or RSS.
