I think you are probably wrong but I wish you were right, and that someone would take advantage of the opportunity. (I'd do it myself if I were a little younger...and omnipotent.)

> Come up with a simple program for accounting that is not cloud based.

Think of how many of those were (and many still are) around, and for how long some have been around. (MYOB came out in the '80s and a version of it is now marketed as AccountEdge.) So why are they not gaining market share by leaps and bounds? And why has Intuit abandoned the very-popular desktop QuickBooks editions in favor of QuickBooks Online, which is a turkey for my purposes. Couldn't they have simply rewritten and continued to improve desktop QuickBooks, to continue selling it forever and continue milking it like a cash cow, as they have been?

Desktop-installed software comes with a lot of baggage (costs for the developer)...the cost of user license management; tech support for installing on many different Windows editions, plus installation problems; tech support for unraveling end-user problems which the users think are an accounting software bug but turn out to be a problem with Windows or file corruption or the myriad things end users tend to misunderstand; and so on.

With cloud based software the developer has full control over the platform the software runs on, rather than having to either support umpteen different versions for Windows, Apple, Linux, Android, etc., or limit their software to only running on part of those OS's (smaller market). The main thing cloud developers have to worry about in terms of compatibility is running under different Web browsers. But some developers limit that problem by specifying which browser you should use. And even when a new version of that browser comes out, they only have that single target for making compatibility changes to their code.

Then too, cross-browser compatibility appears to be improving as the new "standards" (HTML5 for instance) really are becoming better supported by the major browsers. (A few years ago, running under different browsers was sometimes a nightmare for developers.) So now, even client-side code can be better and more reliable than it used to be.

Despite that fact that I hate not having full control of my own data and backups, and I hate not having control over when I allow software to be updated (a cloud-based developer can issue an update which breaks their app for a couple days--but I *never* allow updates for desktop software until I could afford to have it down for a couple days waiting for a fix), and I hate the fact that a service outage--either of the software's servers, or of my Internet service--can suddenly make my accounting application inaccessible (maybe when I need to get a report for the tax lady), and I hate the fact that I have to pay a monthly fee for access to *my own* data and may have to do that "forever" (even if I switch to a different accounting product I will have to continue paying the old product's monthly fee until I no longer need access to old accounting records and reports), and...

...well, despite the things I hate, my desires and opinions don't count much. I have to recognize that the development and delivery cost for developers is a lot less for cloud based software than it is for desktop-installed software. That's why it's unlikely we'll go back to the good ol' days, unless the market for accounting software experiences a major shock--maybe frequent, widespread Internet outages due to sabotage, etc.--which causes people to rethink the wisdom of letting "somebody else" control and serve their accounting data every day.