“This was a once-in-a-lifetime land grab to get this data off PCs and into the cloud,” Rod Drury, Xero’s chief executive and one of its founders, said via Skype from the company’s headquarters in Wellington, New Zealand. But over time, the desktop PC versions of the software became more complicated, and Intuit treated the online versions as an afterthought. In Intuit’s early days, that’s what people said about Quicken and QuickBooks, which made concepts like cash flow, income and expenses, and balance sheets accessible to nonaccountants. “They sing its praises because it’s so easy to use.” Byrne, a certified public accountant in San Diego who works with both companies’ products. “I find that for people who’ve never used any kind of accounting software, the ones I’ve put on Xero are so happy with it,” said Stacey L. In this case, the newcomer is Xero, a New Zealand company that has wooed small businesses and accountants worldwide with a flexible, online accounting system that can be used from a smartphone and can cost as little as $9 a month. Intuit is a classic case of a onetime disrupter being challenged by an upstart with a new approach and a simpler product. So the company faced a hard choice: “Do we have this beautiful child that we’ve had for 33 years that we know we’re not going to feed, or do we find it a new home?” “We try to live up to being a 33-year-old start-up,” Mr. But Intuit decided to shed its PC roots and become a cloud software company.
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