I think author is giving too much credit to Intuit. Intuit was and in many ways is still ignorant about the fundamental change in developing software products. Mint apart from the fact that it is web based is also much smarter than Quicken. Having all the financial data is good but without analysis Quicken is still pretty much returning you a fancy view of their database. The shift towards software products that are quicker and smarter in analyzing data is here, much more important than adding XmlHttpRequests to your app, you can adapt or kill your product like Microsoft did.
Bullshit. Intuit has been successfully fighting Microsoft for a very, very long time, well before Mint, well before Google maps and before ViaWeb + what followed.
According to you, USSR collapsed and dinosaurs became extinct also because they didn't grok the potential of XmlHttpRequest. Not everything revolves around webapps.
Frankly, I have no idea how Intuit did it, they're probably the only desktop competitor Microsoft hadn't crush, and this article didn't really give me any plausible clues as to why.
