As a counterpoint, my wife runs her own bookkeeping business and pretty much all of her clients are using Quickbooks on Windows workstations, with no real desire to try anything new. I know a couple people myself that are using cloud-based accounting products but they seem to be the exception. In both cases they are tech businesses, which perhaps makes them more open to trying something new than a typical small business.

Can you even buy a new Quickbooks desktop license now, I got the impression it had all moved to the cloud.

Yes, they don't make it real obvious, but if you look for Quickbooks Desktop you can find the versions you install instead of the SaaS.

I'll take a guess and say that these are all older businesses.

Businesses that started before the advent of cloud software will continue to use QuickBooks because that's what the owners know, and why fix something that isn't broken? But newer businesses that started in the last few years will be much more likely to use cloud software because it's so much more convenient.

A lot of new businesses (most?) just go with what their accountant and/or bookkeeper tells them to use. A lot of accountants continue to prefer Quickbooks.

One of the accountants I know considers herself computer savvy (she's not, but that's a different topic) and she's pretty young (30s) and she insisted I build her a server for her business to run Quickbooks off of. She won't trust a cloud solution, or even a remotely hosted server. Some of this fear seems to be based on the seminars she goes to which are either held by or attended by FBI special agents. They are pretty good at telling you all the ways you may be hacked, and precious little practical advice on how to avoid that while staying sane.

There are non-technical reasons to prefer locally hosted accounting software. Privacy is one if them.

Do you mean privacy, or security? It would be a massive breach of trust if SaaS accounting products were harvesting your business data a la Facebook...

What about harvesting your data to the IRS?

And there's the catch-22: how do you access the web when the desktop OS's are all gone? Tablets and phones don't cut it and there isn't a single stable desktop OS that hasn't been getting progressively worse for the last 5 years.

I don't agree with the premise that phones and tablets won't cut it for this, but if you need a hassle-free OS for accessing the web then ChromeOS is it.

They still do 'the work' in Excel