We can all agree that if customers demand NET then of course you offer NET. But I think Bill's point was that in the SMB arena, IT expenditure is more likely to come from kids' tuition than from a budget money tree so "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a common creed. Those business people want to treat their tech like the flatbed truck: if the cost of maintenance/consumables is less than the cost of a new model, there needs to be a better reason than newness to upgrade. Without over-stretching the analogy: over time they will modernize parts of the fleet to cover risk of breakdowns or scarce spare parts, but there may well be one or more "old faithful" models still in use many years later. Certainly I can share my own experience that keeping one of the last of the German-assembled Passat 4-Motion Variants for so many years has saved me well into the $100Ks compared to upgrading every 3 years as expected.

As for the best and brightest: interesting that so many who made the move away from VFP only a year or five after I did, today remain in NET rather than following the even more obvious shift toward mobile platforms- an undeniable market shift rather than a calculated vendor strategy. Seems to me some people are mostly aligned with their chosen vendor, which is fine as long as it's not presented as anything else.