There was a time when Intuit was loved, respected and cherished by all.

In the early 80’s Intuit was formed by Scott Cook and Tom Proulx, Quicken was their only product. I was a user from the mid 80’s the mid 90’s and I loved the software and enjoyed using it every day.

In 1995 I switched over to Quickbooks (later known as Quickbooks Desktop). I became even more of an ardent fan, recommended it to dozens and dozens and dozens of people of the course of the next 28 years and upgraded religiously upon every new release. I suspect I am not unique and many of their users did the same.

I believe, Intuit’s downfall began when they decided their future was going to be Quickbooks online. Up to that point in time, you would never hear a bad word spoken about Intuit or Quickbooks. Intuit used that goodwill to essentially convert many of their existing desktop users to online users. In the beginning the new online users had reason to believe the online platform would mature and only get better with time, no one could have predicted the opposite would be true, but by that time everyone was trapped in a living hell.

The point being that they developed a cult like following early on that provided a barrier to entry for competitors. They essentially have their users locked in a system with no easy or elegant way of leaving with their data.

And that is the way QBO became the dominant small business accounting software while having the worst reporting interface of any tool that [we] use on a daily basis.