"Will the lead people at Mint have real power in Inituit? Will one of them be the next CTO?"
Very unlikely. And even if someone from Mint were to become CTO, he would find it very difficult to change direction or focus. Intuit has multiple levels of management fiefdoms(within fiefdoms) and is infested with layers of clueless middle management and with a few honorable exceptions(mostly old timers from the old days, and some sharp kids just out of school, who don't stay very long) the tech people aren't very hot either (which is why, with all their resources and customer base and domain knowledge, they couldn't compete with a thin layer around Yodlee's backend).
Okay. Reasons the Apple/NeXT parallel is totally laughable:
1. Mint founder isn't Steve Jobs.
2. Mint founder didn't also found Quicken.
3. Mint made a pretty little web app, based on someone else's platform, nothing that Quicken themselves couldn't do, if they could be assed to hire a decent consulting firm...
4. NeXT, on the other hand, created bleeding edge hardware and an amazing new operating system that was worthy of being the core for the next decade or two of development.
Apple didn't "buy" NeXT. Apple paid $400 million as a way of groveling -- begging for Jobs to come back. And Jobs brought NeXT tech with him, of course, but let's not fool ourselves and pretend it was due to the tech. The tech was a bonus.
Jobs' return was the return of the prodigal son and messiah and troublemaker all rolled into one, and it was the last desperate gasp of a company that absolutely could not function without him.
But I guess most of you guys were too young to take in those subtleties at the time.
The bottom line is, Mint isn't even that good. Getting bought by their Big Daddy competitor is the expected outcome.
Did you ever really think they were going to spin it into a lifetime of riches and plucky entrepreneurial do-gooding?
They are buddy-buddy with credit card companies; they have a rather draconian ToS; their UI has only the gloss of friendliness, with glitz and shine and no true usability work baked in; they basically have screamed "BUY US!" the entire time they existed.
At $170 million, Mint is a mere toy to Intuit. The Mint founders are not going to revolutionize things at Quicken -- Quicken's key customer base does not overlap with Mint.com's customer base (if we can even call them "customers" since the service is free).
Mint must have been a mere annoyance, a PR problem, an insect buzzing around the room, crying "NEENER NEENER" in Intuit's ear, until Intuit decided it had to swat - or buy.
Will the lead people at Mint have real power in Inituit? Will one of them be the next CTO? Are terms like those ever specified in a buyout?