It is a big move, and a smart one, for Google. And for Intuit, too. But the importance of this is in the hands of the small business owners using Quickbooks. If all they do is dip their feet in the online marketing waters once, create an AdWords ad and let it sit, this won't have much impact whatsoever. AdWords is not the yellow pages -- you can't put an ad out there and let it sit for a year. How many Quickbooks users will understand that and change their marketing / advertising habits? How many will find the time required to really make a serious run at online marketing? That's TBD.

I think the answer to Matt's question of "how many [Quickbooks users] will find the time required to really make a serious run at online marketing" is: very few. Why? How many of the very same users treat their website, in and of itself, as anything more than a yellow pages ad, e.g., a set-it-and-forget-it type of thing, done once and never touched again? And before having a website was a must, these very same sorts of businesses did the very same sorts of things with brochures, advertisements, etc. The fact of the matter is that many (most?) small businesses don't have the time or resources to attend to a proper advertising campaign themselves. Some hire it out (to varying degrees of success) and some just continue running along, forever putting the "small" in "small business" (oftentimes happily so -- and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that).

Furthermore, Eric Schmidt mentioned that less than half of the QB users even have an online presence to begin with... but Google is going to create a site for them. It's a shrewd move to get users into AdWords, but an opinion I share with others I've seen in forums etc. is that these small biz's might be all excited to try it out. But once they see the level of management needed on ppc campaigns, and/or no return on their ad investment, they're gonna be outta there. IMHO, Google needs some sort of strategy to keep these users engaged in using AdWords month after month. Well, they *did* just start the adwords university or whatever it was to train people... that's a start.

John Battelle said it very succinctly on his blog (battellemedia.com) today:
"In Software, It's All About Distribution - And Inventory"

For the AdWords portion of this marketing deal, I think it's almost meaningless unless Google creates a simplified version of AdWords for small business. The Starter Edition they created won't cut it. No, a "Quickbooks Edition" needs to be for search ads only and not include content ads. It has to allow more than 1 ad to be created but must make the process simple for small businesses during the ad creation process. I honestly don't think Google's up to the task. The AdWords platform has been evolving over the years but only getting more complicated. How many small businesses are going to stop using AdWords when their ads become inactive for search? Will they even realize it?

P.S. Barry, thanks for the TagMan mention in your other blog. ;-)