You've used this Quickbooks analogy before - IMO, it's baseless. Quickbooks is a horizontal market application. Most developers here work with vertical or spread-vertical market apps or internal apps. It's not relevant to the discussion.

It's highly relevant that small businesses choose Quickbooks *and rely on it to stay in business* without knowing or caring what it's written in. If NET and SQL Server were always the answer, surely Quickbooks would have been wiped out by MVPs offering NET and SQL Server rewrites. ;-)

Besides, lets not forget that Quickbooks has *become* a horizontal app by turning the accounting segment into a commodity... by producing apps using oddball or obsolete technology that are *still* chosen by small business because the price is right.

But it's ironic that you brought up Quickbooks - have you been following the issues with Quickbooks running on Vista? Maybe some of the hypothetical questions you're posing might "still" have some significance. <s>

Yes I have been following those issues. ;-) What I see is that Quickbooks thrived and had its best success using local data stores at a time when "everybody knew" local data was no good, and apparently without needing to follow even the most basic Windows development rules.