> Running it on the desktop is far inferior, because a great advantage of QBO is the ability for several people, distributed worldwide, to work on the same account at the same time.

Is there any reason the desktop version couldn’t do that if Intuit wanted it to? (I imagine they just artificially limit it to encourage customers to ditch indefinite license purchases in favor of monthly SaaSS subscriptions, ie. it has little to do with technical advantages of the web and much to do with the profit advantages of software that stays on Intuit’s servers.)

Neither the users or the providers want or care about some desktop p2p/self hosted accounting software. It’s an advantage of offload the risk and accountability.

I think there is also some circular logic when looking at the pricing models for SaaS products. Customers use them because they are the best, but they are very likely the best because they have constant revenue from subscriptions.

So maybe you paid $100 for photoshop and used it for 3 years but now you pay $10/month for photoshop which is more expensive but that’s all more money going in to the product. And with a business tool, the better it is, the more money users make using it. So it’s worth paying more for a better product.

Though I must say, for my small non-profit, the $650/yr for QBO is rather stiff. I only stay with it because I know I’ll be able to find a replacement accountant who understands it. As opposed to, say, gnucash or ledger.

>Is there any reason the desktop version couldn’t do that

There is no reason any experience cannot be replicated on any computing device, barring hardware limitations.

There may however be reasons why things are easier done with one architecture than another, and there may be business reasons (not necessarily of benefit to the consumer) why a particular way of doing things will be preferred, and sometimes it will just be because the people who have been tasked with making something are comfortable making it one way and that is the way they will start because - as we are often told on sites like HN - when making something go with what you know if your purpose is to ship.

What would you suggest? Would it be like Valheim (any many other games) where if you want to collaborate, one person needs to be the host and run their copy of the app and if they aren't running it no one can work?

Or are you suggesting the average user would some how spin up a server and run some software and maintain that server so that all the collaborators can access the thing 24/7?

Me, I love that from any of my 7 machines I can access my docs, spreadsheets, tax info, etc. If I have to use a native app then I can only access it on machines that have that app installed. The app might not even exist on some of the machines I use but a web browser does.

As far as I could ever tell the desktop version of QuickBooks was only some sort of Electron or WebView wrapper around the site. Not knocking it - it worked fine. But that was the main reason I was surprised when they End of Life’d the desktop version.

Yup same with Google Docs. And there are plenty of other SPAs like Google Maps that just work so well that way, that it's hard to see the argument for banning them.