The Quickbooks argument has zero relevence. As soon as you are able to 25% of the units they sell in a month, I might re-evaluate my statement. There are other factors that come into play with software like Quickbooks:

1) The program becomes so ubiquitous that IT depts and/or small companies are attracted to it because the training costs are so low since there's a good chance even new hires have used it before. You see many employment advertisements asking for experience with Word, Excel, Quickbooks, maybe even Access. But I've yet to see one requiring experience with John Ryan's software.

2) There is no sourcecode involved. And there will never be a situation where a company will have to take over development of said package. Another reason why it's so popular. If a small company buy's SBT and does some modification to the source, with the help of an outside developer, they face the prospect of what to do if they loose the developer.

3) The local datastore is a non-issue. There are many accounting programs written around VFP. None of them comes close to the market penitration of Quickbooks. You are grasping for straws.

In closing, I'd like to quote an article from this weeks Onion:


Study: 38% of people not actually entitled to their opinion

In a surprising refutation of the conventional wisdom on opinion entitlement, a study conducted by the University of Chicago's School for Behavioral Science concluded that more then one-third of the U.S. population is neither entitled nor qualified to have opinions.

>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.
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>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. ;-)
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>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.
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>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>
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>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.