Peter Karpas, CEO of Xero North America, said the Block link should make his New Zealand-based company better known here. "Our single biggest problem in the U.S. is we are not famous yet," says Karpas. Under the agreement, Xero will be the only online accounting program that Block promotes through locations that sell Block's Small Business Program suite. There are so many low-end cloud vendors these players need something to make them stand out. This group includes FreshBooks, Wave Accounting, Sage One, Exact Online - and others. Clearly, all these  won't survive and some the strategies don't look viable. I would also think that given the low cost of these products, it could be hard to keep selling and market expenses scaled down to that level if there's no broad customer base to spread them over. Hence, any distribution agreement could ultimately help margins.