There are some notable insights to be gained, one of which is that Smith is very clear about where he wants to go. The other is that his acquisition strategy is much sounder than one we saw a few years ago from the company before he got the top job.

Many remember those acquisitions, in bang-bang-bang-bang, order in which Intuit bought American FundWare, the Eclipse distribution package, the MasterBuilder construction software and MRI real estate solutions. The reaction of many observers was "Why in the world did Intuit do that?" and just as quickly, it seemed, three were gone, FundWare sold to Kintera, MasterBuilder to Sage, and Eclipse to Activant. Intuit still owns MRI, which is marketed under the Intuit Real Estate Solutions, although I'm not quite sure why.

Of course, there have been other M&A activity, but PayCycle and Mint.com has more the ring of "Yes. That makes sense."

These make sense in two major ways. First, the acquisitions shore up key product areas. Mint.com will bolster the personal finance area, which comes at a great time since Microsoft Money, at least in its traditional form, is off the market although Microsoft appears likely to come back with something new online. As to PayCycle, Intuit has floundered enough in payroll and needed something better.

However, the most important signal is how quickly Smith is willing to act to move Intuit along its stated path of providing connected services. He told analysts that it would have taken two years for Intuit to add enough features to its Intuit Online Payroll to match PayCycle's capability. Similar reasoning must have been involved in the decision about Mint.com. This is all classic build-versus-buy execution: If you need to do something quickly and there's a good product out there, buy it.

Which leads to a thought about one other area, QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions. As QBES continues to move upstream, Intuit will probably face the same build-buy decision in adding functionality to match at least the low-to-middle parts of the traditional midmarket products. One possible target I've noted is Fishbowl Inventory, which is pretty much the default inventory package for QBES, and which is adding manufacturing capabilities in its next release.

Now, I don't know how Smith feels about Fishbowl as a product or an acquisition target, but if you hear him praise Fishbowl ....