Fishbowl Inventory Blog

I recently read about the very first conference Intuit put on where they officially opened up QuickBooks to third-party development with applications like Fishbowl Inventory. Intuit had realized that they couldn’t be all things to all people so opening up their software to integration with third-party apps was a very smart way to keep their core product while still providing what their customers needed.

The conference was well done and Intuit pulled out all the stops to make sure it was a success. Lots of food and fun, many interesting and informative presentations, and Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, gave an interesting speech about the early days of Intuit.

But the thing that fascinated me most were all the ideas people had for products to integrate with QuickBooks. We (Fishbowl) had already decided on advanced inventory control (manufacturing came later), and we felt that was a good market to go after. It was. Other companies specialized in payroll, CRM, report writing, document management, asset management, and everything else you could think of. Some sounded like good ideas to me while others, I hoped, had a good time at this conference because they weren’t going to be around for the next one. Continue reading →