Success Quote by Scott Cook

Scott Cook is describing a corporate identity crisis that turned into a growth strategy: the moment Intuit stopped treating “consumer” and “business” as separate species. The line is packed with the kind of managerial understatement that signals a genuine pivot. “Subsequent to the original Quicken” anchors the origin myth - a hit product that proved the company could translate messy financial life into friendly software. From there, the real revelation isn’t that small businesses need tools; it’s that a company built around household simplicity could credibly serve firms without losing its DNA.

The phrasing gives away the subtext. “The whole idea that we, as a consumer products company, could actually make business products” reads like a confession of a bias: inside many tech companies, “business” is code for enterprise sales, jargon-heavy features, and a different kind of buyer. Cook frames that assumption as the real obstacle, not engineering difficulty. Calling the shift “a whole revolution in our thinking” is a way of legitimizing what might otherwise sound like obvious adjacent expansion. He’s telling employees and investors that the hard part was psychological - permission to imagine the customer as both a person and a proprietor.

Context matters: Quicken’s success arrived in an era when personal computing was redefining who got access to financial tools. Intuit’s later moves into QuickBooks and beyond weren’t just product line extensions; they were bets that small business owners wanted the same promise consumers did: software that doesn’t punish you for being busy. The quote works because it smuggles strategy into storytelling: innovation as a change in self-concept, not just a new SKU.