Accounting Is Dead - Long Live The Accountant!

It was 1980 when IBM introduced the PC, the first micro-computer to be built with "off the shelf" components. Bill Gates, a college dropout tinkering with computers in his garage, got the contract to develop the operating system for them, and retained the rights to also market copies of the software as his own product, thanks to the brilliant negotiating of his mother, who was also his attorney.
With contract in hand, and $50,000 from his mother, Gates then bought rights to an operating system named QDOS from Tim Paterson, it's creator.
Then, in 1983, Phoenix Technologies introduced an IBM compatible BIOS, and clone manufacturers started rolling personal computers off assembly lines in droves. Computerization of small accounting firms took hold and computers were no longer just the province of the large firms.
The "Big 8" lasted until 1987. The "Big 6" until 1998. And, the "Big 5" until 2001.
Now it's the "Big 4" and they're struggling.
Add the "brain drain" the big accounting firms experienced as they went through the "go-go" days of the 80's and 90's consulting, when the consulting divisions of the large firms were billing ten and twenty times as much in non-audit services as the audit division was billing. Salaries being paid to consulting divisions were growing at astronomical rates and salaries for new auditors were in the tank.
Then, we had the "outsourcing" and "offshoring" fads.
Yeah, they're fads. Wages will rise, and the work will come back (if there's any left to be done, after industry declines to unheard of levels).
Now we have Cloud Computing. It's not computing "in the Cloud." That's just a fancy and extremely large computer network. You think of it as "in the Cloud" because its almost like you don't really have something in your hand that contains your data like you could when it was on your local hard drive instead of one somewhere across the country.
Yeah, we've gone through a lot in the world of accounting practice, and as technology advances, were going to go through a lot more.
The computer revolution has only just begun. But, it's not just "computers" per se, there's a whole litany of things that were spawned by computerization.
Now you have things like POS systems in retail establishments, inventory and process control systems in manufacturing, and data mining through information retrieval systems. The whole spectrum of tools and systems to give answers to questions that no one ever thought to ask before. The first phase was the consulting craze that killed off Arthur Anderson.
Of course consulting started before that, but the rise of the consulting firm as a commodity began in earnest when the big accounting firms started moving in where McKinsey & Co., and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) had once ruled the roost with their "secrets." Consulting became a commodity because the data was available. The data was available because the world was computerized on powerful computers sold at rock bottom prices.