I still think somebody is missing a real opportunity. There are literally a couple hundred thousand QuickBooks desktop users who would jump at the chance to pay, say, $600 to $700 initially, plus a $100 annual maintenance fee for competent, desktop-installed accounting software on Windows. (I know Fahrenheit is priced that way, but it doesn't have much of a track record yet.)

Oh I know, it would take a big development effort to duplicate most of QB's functionality, but thousands of hours of development time have been thrown in the direction of online accounting software, which might have been better spent on creating a good desktop application--basically QB functionality but based on an open database standard (so

But "everybody" (software developers) has been convinced that all accounting software will eventually be online, and I've heard all the arguments for it. Some have merit--lower support costs for instance--but some are very questionable. Letting somebody else control and backup your data makes for "easy" but it also means you've lost control of your data; you no longer own it and don't have any guarantee of access to it. And this whole market for online tie-in apps (MailChimp, reporting/analytics apps, etc.) sounds like a good thing...until you realize how much they add to monthly cost. So it seems that the real market for those add-on apps is "larger" small businesses who can get enough benefit from the add-ons to pay their way.

One example of this is the Xero add-on Figured, which is a farm management app. Most farmers using Xero will pay $47/month, and Figured costs $70/month, for a total of $117/month...or over $1400 per year. And some say getting the most from Figured adds a good bit of complexity to monthly accounting chores.

I miss the days when most of the functionality I needed was embedded in the accounting software.