John,

I choose to work for other companies because I like the idea of a steady paycheck. What the statistics you site don't take into account is what percentage of these small businesses are willing to spend on IT services at all, let alone the expense of custom software.

I know far, far more developers who tried to do something on their own who didn't make it, then the 3 you state who made it rich. I saw several resumes during my last round of interview where the resume included some timeframe of owning a small development shop.

It's very difficult to be a developer and a marketer also. Not too mention that your time is limited. So you can fill your pipeline with only so much at any given point in time. Are there folks able to do this with VFP as their main tool? Absolutely.

But at the same time, is would it be easier for a developer who knew dotnet and sql server to get a group of friends, form a company and go out and market themselves? I don't think there's any question that it would be far easier for them then a VFP group.

There are currently 4 developers, including me, in the group I work in know, soon to be 6. Of the 4, 3 of us are actively learning dotnet. Because we know we have to, to maintain our marketability. Of the 2 new hires, 1 has done dotnet work. He is willing to join us, because of timing. He likes to keep employed.

I've interviewed quite a few folks in the last month who have both VFP and dotnet on their resume. Absolutely none of them offered opinions such as those expressed my many here, such as yourself. As a matter of fact, several of the candidates who listed dotnet specifically stated they would be interested in the current VFP position because they felt confident that the topic of converting to dotnet would come up eventually.

>Dear Perry,
>
>A few facts about small businesses in the USA:
>
>They represent more than 99.7 percent of all employers.
>They employ more than half of all private sector employees.
>They pay 44.5 percent of total U.S. private payroll.
>They generate 60 to 80 percent of net new jobs annually.
>They create more than 50 percent of nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP).
>They produce 13 to 14 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms. These patents are twice as likely as large firm patents to be among the one percent most cited.
>They are 53 percent home-based and 3 percent franchises.
>They made up 97 percent of all identified exporters and produced 29 percent of the known export value in FY 2001.
>
>I have no experience with serving such customers, but it seems obvious to me that providing IT services to such customers is not "slim pickings".
>
>In fact, unless one is a large corporate or occupies a niche whose customers are all corporate, serving small business customers seems *the* obvious way to make a living. With such an accessible, enormous opportunity out there, only a fool would try to force their way into a subset of the remaining 0.3% of firms, unless they have some special reason or business edge in that arena. Even then they'd be exposing themselves to extra risks and deadly competition, not necessarily the best recipe for a long, happy life!
>
>So while I agree with you about some corporates decreeing tools to be used, I can also see that such firms are not the only customer or even the preferred customer for a lot of very successful people visiting this forum. For them, it's about as important/relevant as the frequency of flooding in the Sudan.
>
>I see some other issues as well- such as cited patent generation- that are directly linked to wealth and new fortunes. Opportunities to share in corporate innovation will be tightly constrained unless you are a large shareholder ;-) But I've seen at least 3 people here set themselves up for life by working closely with a small business that came up with something revolutionary. QED.