It's not just small businesses (Score 4, Insightful)

No matter what is written above, it's not just "Small business" which use Jet. I'm under an NDA(s), so won't name names, but lets say that, in the course of the last 18 months, I have worked in 1x Top 5 Bank and 2x top 10 financial services houses, in the UK, that would collapse if they loose their Access Databases within one week. ( Guess what my firm was brought in to do?) It's a similar situation to the household name that most people in the UK and US have some direct or indirect monies held in that currently has more than 700 staff in my company working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to get all their data into a new data ware house after a rather worrying period where their main DB went down. What was the DB? It was a massively hacked about version of a CRM package that a developer got off a coverdisc ( PCPro magazine to be exact ), 6 years ago. Here's the thing: Big companies get into the same messes as small companies. If you truely believe that ALL of the top companies are using Oracle DB's, SOA architectures and data warehouses for mining purposes, your living in a dream world. Working as a solution architect that is meeting 2-3 major, as in top 250, clients a month, and looking at their issues, and the mess that they've got in to, I would be suprised if Microsoft manage to hold their "We're not going to fix it" position for long. Fact is, as soon as CIO's get stressed, they start to shout, and they'll shout at Microsoft if they feel that there is an issue. Remember that a lot of the major firms have 10 and 15 year support contracts with Microsoft, each of them bespoke. If one of them demands a fix, it will immediately be made available to all of the others on bespoke support contracts. At which point there is little reason to hold it back from the other major buyers, and so it cascades down the chain.