I don't know anything about Intuit's history, management structure, internal bureaucracy, vision, or product direction, so it's hard for me to say anything crit

I don't know anything about Intuit's history, management structure, internal bureaucracy, vision, or product direction, so it's hard for me to say anything critical about this post in any level of detail. In general, though, I would point to something that ought to strike anyone with an outside angle on the culture and worldview pervading the tech startup community and much of small business: there is a rather Messianic complex of exceptionalism, particularly with innovation. While it is certainly true that large companies necessarily homogenize business processes and impart well-known characteristics of "mediocrity," that's exactly what they do best: optimise for profitability. Large organisations are very good at extracting value from existing things. They are also the only ones with the capital to bring many innovations from an incipient level to mass-market; that's a large-scale, and very capital-intensive endeavour. I think startups often like to imagine themselves leaders in innovation due to hypothetically negligible distribution and replication cost structure introduced by the Internet, but that's a silly thing to extrapolate to a universal. It really depends on what the product is, and certainly on the nature of the innovation. There are a lot of modern conveniences, well-known products, appliances, brands, etc. that would have never seen the light of day - in a household name sort of sense - if they had been left in the stewardship of the original creators. It takes a lot of money - and, indeed, a lot of thankless, cheerless, rather bland and unremarkable process development and management - to get the escape velocity. My point is that without knowing more about Intuit, I am not convinced, ipso facto, that Mint is going to die a mediocre, bromidic megacorporate death simply because it was acquired by a much, much larger company. That doesn't necessarily follow. That it will undergo considerable change and adaptation to the business imperatives of the acquirer is almost certain, but whether that will turn out to be utterly horrible or something quite pleasant depends on the quality of the acquirer, not the mere fact of the acquisition.