And some of these fall into the "small client" category that John Ryan has described. Sure, they're out there....but at the same time, they're quite diffuse.

As I keep trying to say, few small businesses can afford to pay the cost of the juicy rewrites you keep dangling as an incentive.

IMHO we'll see consolidation of vendors supplying niche products for regional or industry segments. The cost to the customer will be between $500 and several thousand dollars depending on the business advantages offered and add-on services. As I understand it, there are more than a few vendors like this on UT already.

IMHO Vendors will choose the tools they use and unless it adds to cost or breaks stuff, I doubt we'll see massive customer pushback.

Example: in this computer-savvy community, how many use Quickbooks? How many know what it's written in, or used that as a purchase decision? How many decided to commission a rewrite in NET with SQL Server because they're concerned about the obsolete code islands inside Quickbooks or the way data is stored or that fact that its code isn't managed?

QED.