My wife's old company, a fairly significant engineering consultancy, ran it's entire time/job management and invoicing system from a company wide, custom developed Microsoft Access app called 'Time'.

It was developed by a single guy in the IT department and she liked it.

About 5 years ago the company was acquired, and they had to move to their COTS 'enterprise' system (Maconomy).

All staff from the old company had to do a week long (!) training course in how to use this and she hates it.

In future I think there will be more things like 'Time' (though presumably not MS Access based!)

> In future I think there will be more things like 'Time' (though presumably not MS Access based!)

That's my assertion - those things like 'Time' can be developed by an AI primarily because there is no requirement of an existence of a community from which to hire.

It's an example of a small ERP system - no consultants, no changes, no community, etc.

Large systems (Sage, SAP, Syspro, etc) are purchased based on the existing pool of contractors that can be hired.

Right now, if you had a competing SAP/Syspro system freshly developed, that had all the integrations that a customer needs, how on earth will they deploy it if they cannot hire people to deploy it?

I still think MS Access was awesome. In the small companies I worked it was used successfully by moderately tech savvy directors and support employees to manage ERP, license generation, invoices, etc.

The most heard gripe was the concurrent access to the database file but I think that was solved by backing the forms by accessing anything over odbc.

It looked terrible but also was highly functional.