Wow, I just read this post on enterprise applications, and I have to say that it's totally scary! And worst of all, when I was working at the CSVT, we wanted to add new features, and everytime, we were asked if we could communicate with the existing MS ACCESS (you heard right) database, if some part of the system could be different for people in finance and for people in material resources, etc. The whole thing SUCKS! This makes the development of applications harder, longer, more error-prone and less fun for the programmer.