Hiya Jim ---

>I, too, have a number of the small clients. I just had one, a diesel machanic shop with 5 employees ask toe have their ordering system put on the web so their customers could order products interactively. I sure was glad I built them an n-tier soilution in the first place even though it was "overkill". It made it alot easier to give them a web interface to their data.
>

Surely you're not suggesting that over-complexity be built into an application to satisfy unanticipated needs? If the aforementioned app was built single tier or 2-tier, it would still be pretty easy to build Web access to the data via InterDev. Was this a physical 3+-tier model?


>Remember that scalability doesn't always mean the business is going to grow 100 fold, sometimes it simply a desire on the part of the client to move their presence to another platform.

This is true in some cases, but not always. The trick is to identify present and future needs in the analysis model.