Intuit

The right way to lay people off

By Ben Horowitz, contributor

Cloud computing company Opsware was nobody's darling. Then founders Andreessen and Horowitz put the company through three rounds of layoffs. The unlikely result was a big buyout -- here's how it happened.

"I'm tryin' to right my wrongs / But it's funny them same wrongs helped me write this song" -Kanye West

Shortly after we sold Opsware to Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), I had a conversation with the legendary venture MORE

Apple mends a few fences

With partners, developers, competitors and maybe some regulatory agencies

One of Apple's (AAPL) weaknesses as a company -- as even Steve Jobs will admit -- is that it isn't a particularly good neighbor. Like its co-founder and CEO, it can be secretive, prickly and quick to take offense. Witness, for example, the 121 pending lawsuits that list Apple as a plaintiff or defendant.

So it's unusual and sort of refreshing to see MORE

Quicken for health benefits?

Intuit, maker of finance software, turns its attention to health-care bills.

If you have health coverage, perhaps you've received that ominous-looking piece of mail from the insurance provider that declares: "This is not a bill," but looks a lot like one.

It's called an "explanation of benefits." But the correspondence doesn't seem to offer much of an explanation to anyone who lacks a medical degree or background as a company benefits MORE

What Microsoft will do next

By Michael V. Copeland

The last time Microsoft walked away from a major acquisition was more than a decade ago. It was 1995 and a $2 billion bid to buy financial software company Intuit fell apart under scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Justice. While there are clear differences between Microsoft's Intuit deal and its failed attempt to buy Yahoo, a look at what happened within Microsoft after the Intuit bid MORE