According to Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch in the blog post entitled Major Google/Intuit Partnership there has been yet another major distribution/bundling deal between Google and a major software distributor. Mike writes
The Google services will be built into QuickBooks 2007, available this Fall, for U.S. customers only. I sure hope there’s an easy way to turn this stuff off. Update: Notes from Analyst call: Eric Schmidt is talking about embracing the long tail of small businesses on the conference call. Less than half of Quickbooks businesses have an online presence. This will help them get online, he says. Businesses will be able to create an adwords account using pre-filled information from Quickbooks. If the business doesn’t have a website Google will create a notecard page for them. All businesses will be given a $50 credit to start. Google will also create a business listing for businesses for search on Google.com and Google Maps. Intuit is also integrating Google Desktop (borderline Spyware) into Quickbooks. Thank God this is opt-in…but given that Quicken’s customers are not on average very web savvy, there is a very good chance that many small businesses will opt in without really understanding what they are doing (storing the contents of their hard drive on Google’s servers).
I sure hope there’s an easy way to turn this stuff off. Update: Notes from Analyst call:
Eric Schmidt is talking about embracing the long tail of small businesses on the conference call. Less than half of Quickbooks businesses have an online presence. This will help them get online, he says. Businesses will be able to create an adwords account using pre-filled information from Quickbooks. If the business doesn’t have a website Google will create a notecard page for them. All businesses will be given a $50 credit to start. Google will also create a business listing for businesses for search on Google.com and Google Maps.
Intuit is also integrating Google Desktop (borderline Spyware) into Quickbooks. Thank God this is opt-in…but given that Quicken’s customers are not on average very web savvy, there is a very good chance that many small businesses will opt in without really understanding what they are doing (storing the contents of their hard drive on Google’s servers).
Google has been on a impressive rampage of distribution deals over the past year. It's made deals with AOL, Sun, Adobe, MySpace, Dell and now Intuit to distribute its software and services. This means it'll be even tougher for competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft to gain marketshare from it since it is buying up all the defaults and entry points into search and related services it can find.
A cunning yet expensive strategy. It'll be interesting to see how many more deals they'll make before their done locking up all the defaults they want.