Spencer Chase reminds me of a hazard of special-purpose programs.
If the firm who publishes the specialty product ceases business, or if
it doesn't have enough sales to bother making a version for the next
operating system that you may want to use, you may have wasted a lot
of time entering your data into a specialized program.

He cautions against using a proprietary roll inventory program unless
it can also export the data in a standard format such as tabbed text or
xml.  Then it can be imported by another spreadsheet program or data
base manager program.

Robbie Rhodes - Mechanical Music Digest