>>>Wider world.
>
>OK. Since SAP bought Crystal Reports' developer, that may have something to do with the ramp down. But lets not forget incompetence: Cloverleaf had a huge footprint in the interface engine world until purchased by private market wonks who managed to tank it. And of course there's quality, since SSRS does have a good rep. Producing really good stuff like this may well be MS's future, similar to IBM's redefinition of itself after it lost the OS war to MS.

Well, several things happened. Yes, in the mix of the SAP news at the time, there were licensing changes that irritated some of their customer base.

My first book (published in 2006) was on Crystal Reports, and at the time I had little interest in SSRS. SSRS at the time (in SQL 2005) was "OK", but paled in comparison to Crystal.

But then Microsoft released SSRS 2008 and that's when things really changed. SSRS was a bit leap forward and happened at a time where Microsoft became a player in the world of Data Warehouse and BI systems. So SSRS benefited in the market, not just from better features in 2008 and then 2008R2, but also from a growing SQL database platform.

If you had told me in 2006 that by 2007 I'd be developing SSRS reports for clients and that by 2008 I'd be teaching SSRS, I would have said, "NEVER".