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An Intuit-ive Idea
November, 2003 In the mid-1980s it was still possible to pluck pedestrians who had never used a computer off the streets of Palo Alto. Tom LeFevre, MBA '74, who worked for a software startup, cooked up an audacious idea: Intent on achieving ease of use for the company's proposed accounting software, he asked folks off the street to install the program and print a check within 15 minutes. LeFevre then tested the product—what became Intuit's highly successful Quicken—on members of the Palo Alto Junior League. His was the "first instance of the usability testing that later became a standard [software] industry practice," according to a new book, Inside Intuit: How the Makers of Quicken Beat Microsoft and Revolutionized an Entire Industry, by Suzanne Taylor and Kathy Schroeder, both MBA '90. Taylor is a marketing consultant who worked eight years at Intuit, a company that today has 6,000 employees. In 2001 she became reacquainted with classmate Schroeder, a marketing executive and writer, when both taught a Stanford continuing education course on marketing. They decided to write a book about Intuit's roller-coaster history and got permission from Intuit cofounder Scott Cook to conduct exclusive interviews. Besides LeFevre, Intuit's first vice president of marketing, other Business School alums prominently mentioned in the book are Ridge Evers, MBA '82, the maverick project manager for QuickBooks, Intuit's accounting software for small business; and Steven Aldrich, MBA '95, who founded Interactive Insurance Services, a Web business that was merged into Intuit but later sold. |
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