Quickbooks seems to be the silver bullet. As soon as that runs on linux or mac its over for MS. Yes, I hate quickbooks too, but its the gold standard for the paper pushers, and like the loathsome and ubiquitous .doc format for documents, if someone's gonna send you some financial whatnot its gonna be a .qif or a .qbb file. I'de love to see quickbooks disappear but with the size of the userbase it has, I don't see that happening soon. Hence a binary compatible to XP operating sense makes more sense for most businesses now until they release a linux version of quickbooks. And of course that is probably going to happen the day after the first-of-never. I have thought of trying it with wine, but are Intuit faithful to their own design betwen versions? They basically have every user locked into a forced upgrade path each year. If someone's got 2008 and you have 2006, you won't be able to open any file they send you, so you are stuck forking out the cash to upgrade. And when they move something or change a mechanism, will it work with wine without weeks of downtime to figure it out in the face of a closed lipped and unhelpful intuit support staff whose final answer will always be: "linux: not supported"?
devil and the deep blue sea problem, this one...