Microsoft Access System being discontinued?

The Access user base is far too well established, and organizations too deeply rusted on to Access/Office, to ever see it discontinued.

In my 30+ years of using Access (as both a tertiary trained scientist and tertiary trained programmer), I find that much of the criticism and disparaging commentary about Access comes from IT staff who say it's not a 'proper' application. So why do they think this?

Access is great for rapid app development, it's robust in the hands of experience programmers (and knowledgeable users), is easily accessible via ODBC/OLEDB, has massive community support and above all else, solves business problems. But, the emergence of Access follows a trend that emerged in the '90's that placed the then amazing power of desktop solutions in the hands of the untrained.

There was a time when typing was done by trained typists, when data analysis was conducted by data analysts and mapping was done by cartographers. Then in the '80s' along comes desktop word processing, and suddenly everyone's a typist hacking together templates and keyboard shortcuts and functions and generating versions with every tiny edit (...copy 1, ...copy 2, .... copy 9999) scattered across drives and folders.

In the 80's we also saw the proliferation of desktop spreadsheets, and everyone became a data analyst. And for better or worse, we saw all manner of spreadsheet disasters, spaghetti formulas, dangerous code and, ultimately, time-wasting as users fumble around with functions and arrays and charts and macros and VBA; one well-known Australian entrepreneur even banned spreadsheets when confronted with a financial statement full of errors (I'd have banned the developer).

And then came desktop GIS, and now everyone can make maps and justify the cost of gigabytes of data splattered across disks and network drives.

Throw into this mix the emergence of desktop databases - especially Microsoft Access when bundled with Microsoft Office - and their facility for replacing paper records of customers and accounts and invoices and project management and staffing and orders and inventory, and we watched digital anarchy reign with everyone free to generate complex, oft-impenetrable applications that work with masses of data spread across personal drives, and networks and USB sticks and external hard drives and cloud storage.

Is it any wonder the IT department freaks out - so much power in so many users - "it's like giving children chainsaws" I recall one lamenting.

But why would IT dump on Access?

I'd argue it's because unlike word processors, spreadsheets and GIS, Access is a powerful tool that in untrained hands results in serious corporate risk for the IT department. Users with no understanding of data, data modelling and databases, can easily hack together an Access application that in time, becomes a valuable business asset.  And when it does, it's often the IT department that's asked to take it on and support it. Now the IT department has responsibility for an application that's (often) poorly specified, poorly designed, poorly programmed and poorly documented - if at all. The first thing they'd want to do is ship it into the corporate database, or move it to the cloud. But as we know, refactoring or reengineering even a well-designed and well-documented application can be fraught.

So in summary, in my experience it's the proliferation of Access applications built with little understanding of the fundamentals of relational theory, entity-relation modelling and database design generally, that has resulted in an underworld of critics and destroyers who take every opportunity to rumour the demise; it behoves us developers to design well, build well and document well.