Yes, that's usually the critical point.
As for Access being ubiquitous, I think it was more of a factor of it being part of Microsoft Office, at least in the start. The old-timers tell me that Paradox was the Access before Access even existed but made mistake of moving to GUI too late, too little. There also was FileMaker but when it came to deciding between using what was bundled in Office against buying a new program... well, it's not that hard a decision. Over the time, I do think, however, Access has matured very much and is along the best technology for front-end.
More importantly, I always perceive front-end as quite fragile... clients are going to be wanting to change requirements and it's seldom the data structure but rather the representation (assuming it was correctly designed in first place, of course). For even more perspective... listen to what this Oracle guy has to say... Basically he comes out in favor of APEX (that's Oracle's version of Access) for similar reasons.
Finally, one more bigger advantage I see with Access is that if a client came to me and said, "gee, we can't use Access; we need to use .NET because we want a pretty graphical layout and it's not easy to do that in Access.", then my response would be, "I can build you an Access project and write a .NET library that Access can call and display a form for your graphical requirement while using Access for the rest of 80% of the project."
Guess what's going to be cheaper -- an Access application and a .NET library or a full-blown .NET front-end?
So when we take in the account of Access's ability to consume external resources and its eventual expansion into web with Sharepoint, it's going to be tough to beat it out in terms of rapid development, IMHO.
As for Access being ubiquitous, I think it was more of a factor of it being part of Microsoft Office, at least in the start. The old-timers tell me that Paradox was the Access before Access even existed but made mistake of moving to GUI too late, too little. There also was FileMaker but when it came to deciding between using what was bundled in Office against buying a new program... well, it's not that hard a decision. Over the time, I do think, however, Access has matured very much and is along the best technology for front-end.
More importantly, I always perceive front-end as quite fragile... clients are going to be wanting to change requirements and it's seldom the data structure but rather the representation (assuming it was correctly designed in first place, of course). For even more perspective... listen to what this Oracle guy has to say... Basically he comes out in favor of APEX (that's Oracle's version of Access) for similar reasons.
Finally, one more bigger advantage I see with Access is that if a client came to me and said, "gee, we can't use Access; we need to use .NET because we want a pretty graphical layout and it's not easy to do that in Access.", then my response would be, "I can build you an Access project and write a .NET library that Access can call and display a form for your graphical requirement while using Access for the rest of 80% of the project."
Guess what's going to be cheaper -- an Access application and a .NET library or a full-blown .NET front-end?
So when we take in the account of Access's ability to consume external resources and its eventual expansion into web with Sharepoint, it's going to be tough to beat it out in terms of rapid development, IMHO.
