I have talked to a lot of financial advisors lately and many of them say that product reviews influence their decision making process when they are shopping for software. The names of one or two reviewers come up consistently when I ask advisors to whom they pay attention. Andy Gluck Is a name that I hear mentioned consistently.
Recently Gluck wrote a column for the Investment Advisor magazine and website about Intuit and PortfolioMinder. The column was mainly about Intuit and what it means for Intuit to be entering the financial planning software market. Gluck said Intuit’s entry into this market could be "a pivotal development in the evolution of the independent advisor segment of the financial services industry". I would definitely agree with that assessment. I only have four months of experience at Intuit, all of it working on PortfolioMinder, but I am convinced that Intuit is in this for the long haul.
I am still reading the book The Innovator’s Solution by Christensen and Raynor. By reading it one can really see how the PortfolioMinder product fits into Intuit’s strategy for disruptive innovation and customer driven innovation. This is where Gluck gets it wrong about PortfolioMinder. He said that his panel of "advisors who attended the Web demo—mostly sophisticated advisors who
have attended demos of several other PMS applications with me in the
past—reacted. It is stunning to see how simplistic the system is "
If you read The Innovators Solution or listen to what Intuit says about PortfolioMinder you will see that Intuit is not making the mistake of trying to compete with the high cost end full featured, expensive solutions that alredy exist. PortfolioMinder instead is designed as a relatively low priced entry level solution that is targetted at customers who don’t want or can’t afford the complex expensive solutions that are available today. PortfolioMinder essentially competes against non consumption not against existing well entrenched products.
We have a ways to go before PortfolioMinder is ready for release but I’ve talked to a lot of advisors in the past few weeks and I believe we will find a ready market among the advisors who don’t have a solution today. Gluck missed the point when he picked his panel of reviewers for PortfolioMInder but he got it rightr when he said that "If Intuit— ….. —can fulfill its mission in this little corner of the
world, independent advisors will be better off." I also believe that PortfoliomInder will help Intuit’s Quicken group become a growth engine for the compnay. I am excited to be a part of it.
Marion's Blog 
For the record, within a year of my review, Intuit killed PortfolioMinder and left the advisor software market.
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