I am tempted to say Intuit is saying “Who needs resellers?” at least the mid-market VARs that have largely abandoned the product after leaping on it a few years ago. I get the feeling that Intuit has pretty much walked away from that channel because things that resellers were asking for, such as greater distinction in features between QBES and QB Pro, just haven't happened. Much the business comes from upgrades. “About 70 percent of those customers are stretchers, they have outgrown Pro or Premier,” CEO Brad Smith said during yesterday’s earnings conference call. He didn’t answer a question about marketing channels, but did note that since QBES has the same “with a few additional features. It’s a very healthy margin product.” There’s not much of a message going into the market, except discount. The deal de jour is 30 percent off on a 30-user system. And we’ve seen nothing in the way of press releases that deal only with QBES in some time. That came as the overall number of QB units declined for the second consecutive year. For the most recently ended quarter, Intuit sold 404,000 units, down from 431,000 a year earlier and 529,000 units two years ago. At the same time, there were 241,000 subscriptions for QB Online sold in the quarter, up from 159,000 in the corresponding quarter of fiscal 2010 and 139,000 in the same quarter of fiscal 2009. However, in the previous earnings conference, Smith had said the QB Online business is coming from new users, not desktop users flipping over.