There was little that Intuit (INTU) could do to stop the earthquake that s ravaged the financial system in the last six months, threatening the small businesses that buy the company s accounting software. But the company has long had a history of giving its basic products away, so with opportunistic tongue firmly in cheek, Intuit offered its own stimulus package" a suite of small-business software that s free for the first-year.

It s this kind of stunt part pricing innovation, part cheek that s helped Intuit corner the market on financial services software. But CEO Brad Smith is neither number cruncher nor tech geek. Just 44, he s ascended to the corner office of the $7.4 billion financial-software firm by way of managerial stints at Pepsi and ADP. He loves leadership more than Linux, and with framed stills from "Forrest Gump" and "Gladiator" on his office walls for inspiration, Smith is more apt to reach for a sports clich than a tech metaphor.

Intuit isn t quite what you d expect either. It makes financial-services software utilitarian programs like TurboTax, the do-it-yourself tax-prep package; QuickBooks, the small-business accounting software; and Quicken, the personal-finance management tool. TurboTax Intuit s biggest brand makes up 30 percent of the firm s $3.1 billion in revenue; the rest comes from a multitude of businesses. Intuit is taking a cue from the popularity of social-networking sites and creating online communities devoted to taxes and small-business accounting. It s also aggressively developing mobile applications; 20 percent of its revenue is spent on research and development.

But the future s not quite here yet, and today s reality is plenty challenging. Many of Intuit s business lines are tied to the success of small businesses and banks, and the longer the recession lingers, the more those lines could suffer. Meanwhile, its best-known brand, Quicken, barely contributes to the bottom line. Perhaps worst of all, Intuit increasingly finds its competitors offering products and services free, whether that s Mint s online personal-finance software or the federal government s free tax-filing plan. Intuit has responded by giving away basic versions of its own products, but that runs into the same problem Internet companies have been desperately trying to solve namely, how to turn eyeballs into dollars. They haven t figured out how to get paid on the web, which makes them vulnerable, says Bernard Lirola, managing director of Needham Investment Management.

So far, though, the Street doesn t seem overly worried. Demographics favor Intuit s tax business younger people are more likely to want to file taxes online and by charging a flat fee for many of its small-business services, Intuit will thrive as long as its customers don t disappear. Shares of Intuit fell just 20 percent in 2008, far better than the market. On a sunny morning in Mountain View, Calif., Smith talked about the company s new health-care software, lessons from Intuit s biggest mistakes and why it s not such a bad idea to get tax advice from anonymous strangers.

SmartMoney: Let s start with the obvious. Your main customers are banks and small businesses. How will you survive this financial crisis?

Brad Smith: Two-thirds of the company s growth areas are reasonably recession-proof the tax business and financial services. And about half of our small-business line helps with payroll and payment services, which is pretty resilient. The area where we re seeing an impact is in our QuickBooks bookkeeping software. Typically when there s an unemployment spike, people start small businesses. Right now credit cards are maxed out, and they can t get a loan from the bank. So we re seeing a slowdown. But our goal is to help consumers and small businesses come out of this thing better than they could have on their own, even if we had to give them the product for free.

That s been the big puzzle for companies that offer free services on the web: How do they make money?

I ll give you an example. We ve offered a free version of TurboTax for three years, and we ve found that six out of 10 people who use the free version were not using software to do taxes before. So right off the bat, it grows the category. And then after they do the federal filing for free, they re willing to pay for the state product, because they can import some data out of the federal. So we end up selling them something. The next year, if they want to import that information electronically instead of rekeying it in, they ll have to pay to do it. We have an entry-level product that causes people to change their methods, and then we have additional services that they re willing to pay for.

Quicken is probably Intuit s best-known product, but it barely contributes to the bottom line. Does it have a future?

The category of personal-finance software for the desktop has been declining for a decade. The writing is on the wall. Most people manage their personal finances through their bank now. So we ve taken the best of Quicken and built it into the Digital Insight banking platform.

Are banks using the Quicken brand, then?

Some do. We let the bank decide.

It sounds like Quicken s days are numbered.

No. We re launching Quicken Health Expense Tracker to enter the health care market. Like we did for taxes, we re going to help you manage the financial decisions around your health care. Right now the average consumer waits until they get the third bill before they actually pay, because they re not sure what the insurance has covered or what they re supposed to pay. We re trying to make it easier for people to understand what they owe, get it paid and do it in English.

Hasn t the track record on new products been spotty?

Our batting average isn t what we want it to be. We ve had 54 new product ideas in the last 10 years, and out of those we ve had fewer than 10 that have grown to some meaningful size.

What have you learned from the mistakes?

We did a couple of things. One, we didn t find an important problem that we were able to solve easier or at a better value than an alternative that already existed. Or we did find a problem, but it wasn t a big problem. We launched this Quicken retirement planner, and we got 91 or 92 percent share. But it was of a tiny market. So we shut the product down.

Intuit hosts online forums for QuickBooks and TurboTax. Should I really be taking accounting advice from anonymous strangers?

Last year TurboTax had 40 percent of its customers questions answered by other customers, and the accuracy rate was higher than we ve ever had in 24 years.

Somehow, that doesn t inspire a lot of confidence.

The TurboTax community includes very well-educated, well-trained, experienced users. And we have our own experts who try to make sure that no erroneous answers get put out there. It played out in the Wikipedia world, and it s played out in our world. The community is so much more informed than you believe it to be.

It still sounds dicey. I bet your lawyers hate it.

We don t offer tax advice; we answer questions about the product. The community can ask each other questions, and they police themselves. We make sure that the advice we provide is within the limits of what we can do.

Two years ago the site crashed on Apr. 15, and a number of TurboTax users weren t able to file on time. That s a nightmare.

We thought we had enough capacity to be able to handle the volume, but the spike on April 14 and 15 exceeded our expectations. Since then we ve made a concerted effort to build the capacity up. Last year we handled twice the volume in that April 14-15 window than we did the prior year, and we had no issues. This year we have actually planned for an exponential amount above that.

Do you do your own taxes?

I do. It takes me about two-and-a-half hours. It takes that long because I m very anal-retentive and I want to make sure I ve got everything all lined up. When I relocated, I d do it myself and then take it to an accountant.

You ve been CEO for about a year. It seems as if you really like the job.

Most people don t believe me, but I never aspired to be CEO. I do love leadership helping ordinary people achieve extraordinary things. Because I am definitely ordinary, and I ve been able to accomplish things with a group of people that never would have happened if I were just playing by myself.