</snip>

Jim put me in touch directly with the head of the
accounting dept. She brushed  me off after a 2 minute conversation, without
(again)
even looking at my system or asking any questions.

</end snip>

I think part of the problem is many Accounting Curriculums today use
BillWare to teach with. This creates a bias that I have encountered over the
years. When the colleges promote the use of MS Excell over other products,
the finacial folks naturally want what they are familiar with.

I have spent large amounts of time educating finance managers on
reliability, maintenance and support issues surounding 'their' data.
Unfortunately, most of these folks did the bare minimum for their CS classes
in college and still treat the computer systems as a magical box.

Personally, I started with the HP3000 while in college. That is perhaps the
main reason I am on the box today. I would like to see HP get this box into
these institutions as a learning tool so perhaps other will be influenced
into the future.