My company is somewhat involved in booking and we've found it to be very specific to the vertical. We looked at building something that integrated with Quickbooks, but found that it's nearly impossible to come up with something that works for enough customers to make it profitable. From what I can tell, people on the Quickbooks team tried it too and decided against it. The long tail just has too many differing needs.
The problem you've listed (not knowing how long a dental appointment will last) isn't really a problem for a booking system...a dental office with a receptionist scheduling patients will run into the exact same issue and the same rules that the receptionist uses can be programed into a booking engine. The bigger problem for a dental office is that the calendar is locked in a management system that's probably running on a Windows computer somewhere in the office. Maintaining two calendars is almost never going to work and the one in the cloud will never be the calendar of record. Short of going the ZocDoc route and having practices reserve certain spots for appointments booked online (businesses hate doing this), you're always going to run into problems with conflicting appointments. The interesting thing is that most dental practices won't care about conflicting appointments since the only patients that will book online will be new patients and patients that have fallen out of the typical schedule. Everyone else will schedule their appointments with the receptionist at the end of their previous appointment. So most dental practices will happily juggle appointments to fit those specific types of patients into their schedule.
But that's the dental industry and almost every other industry has just as many quirks as the dental industry does, if not more. And that's why the market will most likely be filled with smaller, specialized vendors that target either one or possibly a handful of verticals. I'm betting the winners will be the companies that make the management systems used by the businesses, but that's not happening quickly since most of them are small ISVs that only understand Windows development and think cloud computing is something that meteorologists do.
The problem you've listed (not knowing how long a dental appointment will last) isn't really a problem for a booking system...a dental office with a receptionist scheduling patients will run into the exact same issue and the same rules that the receptionist uses can be programed into a booking engine. The bigger problem for a dental office is that the calendar is locked in a management system that's probably running on a Windows computer somewhere in the office. Maintaining two calendars is almost never going to work and the one in the cloud will never be the calendar of record. Short of going the ZocDoc route and having practices reserve certain spots for appointments booked online (businesses hate doing this), you're always going to run into problems with conflicting appointments. The interesting thing is that most dental practices won't care about conflicting appointments since the only patients that will book online will be new patients and patients that have fallen out of the typical schedule. Everyone else will schedule their appointments with the receptionist at the end of their previous appointment. So most dental practices will happily juggle appointments to fit those specific types of patients into their schedule.
But that's the dental industry and almost every other industry has just as many quirks as the dental industry does, if not more. And that's why the market will most likely be filled with smaller, specialized vendors that target either one or possibly a handful of verticals. I'm betting the winners will be the companies that make the management systems used by the businesses, but that's not happening quickly since most of them are small ISVs that only understand Windows development and think cloud computing is something that meteorologists do.