The thing to remember is that platform changes take time. True, accountants leaped on the CD-ROM-based and the Internet-based tax research bandwagons and they tore up the paths to the computer suppliers to move into the multiple monitors. But those things demonstrated clear and immediate savings. Moving from DOS to Windows, some may remember, took more time because many practitioners believed that data entry was faster in DOS. And the dollars-and-cents part of the online equation hasn't been completely demonstrated, although the ability to work remotely and collaborate has a lot of fans in other applications.
My sense is that the professional market is not going to move into SaaS as quickly as consumers have with the online version of Intuit's TurboTax package. And Intuit, with the largest market share, is only readying federal and 1040 state forms for its ProLine Tax for tax year 2009. Like it or not, SaaS, ASP-based, hosted, Internet-based, online, is coming. Just don't be surprised if next year at time I'm writing about a less-than-blistering pace of adoption.