>Have you seen the number of bugs that have been fixed between versions 6 and 9?

Of course I have. Why would you assume that I haven't?
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>For me, that is enough in itself to justify an upgrade let alone all the new features that have been introduced. We, as developers, aren't just responsible for creating and maintaining apps that the business ask for, but should also proactively suggest and educate them with regard to potential improvements. With the introduction of all the new features in VFP, I find it hard to believe that isn't any new feature that could be exploited to significantly improve your application or assist your business community.

That depends upon your definition of "significantly." There are features of VFP 9 I could incorporate which would give order of magnitude improvement in response time. OTOH, my users can't distinguish between response times of .03 seconds and .012 seconds. I could re-work the user interface and make it better conform to the "standards" which have been promulgated here and other places. At the end of the day (more likely, the end of a large number of days), I would have a system with exactly the same functionality, non-noticable performance improvements, and a number of UT threads entitled This used to work in VFP 6. Why doesn't it work in VFP 9

A while ago, my management actually came to me about updating to VFP 8. I asked them what additional functionality they wanted to incorporate into the system. The bottom line was the benefits didn't justify the costs and they chose my recommendation of spending the money (actually my time) enhancing a different application written for a different environment.



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>Regarding the OS incompatibilty issue, I don't buy that either. There are a number of different ways to deploy VFP apps regardless of the OS; my personal favorite is to deploy the app using terminal services. If your users are still on Win98 boxes why are you not looking to develop thin client apps or deploy using terminal services?
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>So, to some extent, I can agree that ignorance is probably playing a big part in people not upgrading.
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>However regarding the lack of upgrades, I believe it is ignorance in another way. For the last few years, senior management have viewed IT as a cost and have not considered the benefits that IT has returned to the business. In fact, a recent study showed that 1 in 3 senior management couldn't site one benefit that the IT had provided them, let alone quantify the benefits in monetary terms. This is truely incredible. It is quite obvious then, that over the last few years of when the key company strategies have been cost cutting excercies and cutbacks that IT has suffered more than most.
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>Unless we as IT staff can get better as salesman, and start to quantify the return on investments to demonstrate that we provide added value our users will remain in the dark and be reluctant to invest in upgrades.
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Absolutely agree. That presumes, though, that there are quantifiable benefits from the upgrade. And that isn't always the case.