It always felt like a huge miss to me that Microsoft didn’t bring Access to the web and/or mobile apps. For all its flaws, it was a simple drag-and-drop editor that almost anyone could use to build simple apps that could power decent-sized businesses.
Having a relational database in a gui was great. The problem with access was that it tried to support network applications as a backend but supported a punishingly low number of connections. Having an application that crashed with 10-50 connections put it in an awkward space. Businesses without a strong technical team would build on it, release with N=1 load testing, and get surprised when it crashed out at scale. MS wasn't going to improve it, because they wanted more sophisticated customers to buy SQL server.
