When Intuit told its users on a Facebook page two weeks ago that maintenance had caused an outage of some of its web pages, it was more than lightning striking twice. It was the third time since early in the summer of 2010 that the company has admitted to maintenance spurring an outage. Then couple that with the company's announcement that it is steering QuickBooks graduates to Intacct.

What is going on at Intuit? It has shown signs that it is having problems getting applications to the cloud. And despite a $250 million data center that went into operation two years ago, in two of the cases in which maintenance caused a web outage more than one power backup system failed. The most recent outage was early this month and another occurred in November.

The issues of producing cloud software are easier to diagnose. It's tougher to get applications to the cloud than many vendors thought. Intuit spent much of two years trying to produce a SaaS-based practice management systems before in September entering a deal with BigTime to utilize that company's Internet-based practice management features in the Intuit product. But the Intuit website is still telling visitors to learn more about the next phase of its pilot.

In the last month, it began openly endorsing Intacct, which markets only cloud-based accounting applications, as a good tool for the QB users who have outgrown that product. That seems to do two things: First, it says Intuit does not have a cloud product of its own that is going to be ready in the next few months; second, it's a pretty serious slap in the face to its own resellers who are trying to sell QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions to those same QuickBooks users. I suppose there is a natural divide here between those who are ready for an Internet application and those who are not.

One likely cause covers both of these issues. And that is the company's furious push to stress connected systems. My suspicion is that employees responded to management's direction to say, "Sure, we can do this" and either they told management what it wanted to hear or management underestimated the challenges in moving to the cloud.

Whatever the case, it's not working the way it was supposed to.