Are you saying quickbooks success was because of rather than inspite of their proprietary data format?No, I'm saying that Quickbooks with its local storage achieved dominance during a period when "everybody knew" that C/S was the way to go. Everybody except millions of small business customers, that is. ;-)
Why? Because small business prefers to pay $139 for Quickbooks rather than $5000 for the licenses, OS and server it rides in on ;-)
Obviously the arrival of LAMP and cut-down freeware databases from multiple vendors changes that. Intuit saw it, other vendors are seeing it. I suppose the new question is whether small business will leapfrog the C/S scenario straight to the ASP model that all the pundits are saying is the future. Getting rid of the dbf on Martha's Win95 PC is probably a good start. ;-)
"... They ne'er cared for us
yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses
crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to
support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act
established against the rich, and provide more
piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain
the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and
there's all the love they bear us."
-- Shakespeare: Coriolanus, Act 1, scene 1
