Microsoft ended an initiative that it appeared to torpedo from the day it hit the market by announcing that it will stop sales of Office Accounting, originally known as Small Business Accounting, on November 16. It marked yet another Microsoft failure in the low-cost financial application market and a sign that even Microsoft can't move a significant share of the market from QuickBooks. Microsoft will support the installed base for five years. Office Accounting had very little visibility in the market over the last two years.Small Business Accounting had been preceded by Great Fanfare before it was introduced in the fall of 2004. But on its launch date, Microsoft held a major announcement regarding its mid-market accounting products and SBA never got out of the shadows.
Microsoft's previous efforts in this space include Profit, which was written by Great Plains when that company was still independent, and introduced in February 1993. It was sold to great Plains in March 1994 which then sold it late in 1997 to the former Champion Software, which killed it in 2002. There was the .com-era Finance Manager, which was to be distributed via CPA2Biz through an alliance with Microsoft, but died mid-2001 before being released. Microsoft also promoted the Financial Analysis Pak, a set of pivot tables that was supposed to work with mid-market accounting software. That product never made it to market under that name. It was re-branded Small Business Financial Manager, and rolled into Microsoft Office.
Microsoft also bowed out with the Small Business Manager, which was designed as a Dynamics GP product for companies not quite in range for that product. Debuted in 2002, it was renamed Small Business Financials and killed a few years ago.