3. The applications are mostly horizontal. Right now, they’re designed to handle the bookkeeping needs of most small businesses, regardless of their industry. But most small businesses I know have more industry specific requirements and will not have their needs addressed with these services. I’m keeping my eye on some of the up and coming online products not reviewed, like Plex for manufacturers and ServiceMax for people in the service industry, as well as bigger players like Intacct and NetSuite. The author’s approach for this book was to focus only on applications for micro-business, small business and invoicing. I’m not so sure they had much of a choice otherwise. There are few players on the market yet who do much else.