>>Have you seen the number of bugs that have been fixed between versions 6 and 9?
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>Of course I have. Why would you assume that I haven't?

At the end of your last message you stated that there simply isn't any need to upgrade your apps. I was trying to point out that the bug fixes combined, normally a very good incentive for upgrades, with the additional capabilities would more than justify an upgrade. I suppose that what I am saying is that upgrades need to be marketed to the business community with the offer of improvements in the app and ultimately an improvement in their business.

Personally, I view the business and my applications as ever changing environments that need to be continuously adapted and upgraded. The business needs to communicate their requirements, and we need to communicate opportunities to them. To be honest, I find it amazing that you business has no new requirements and at the same time you were unable to dangle a carrot in front of them that would want them to upgrade, but maybe this is because you only view an upgrade as a chance to increase performance or a rework of the interface? I can't say that I know your business environment, but is there really not any additional functionality in VFP that made you thought wow, I could do this with that and the users would love it?

To put this into context, my favorite car manufcaturer is Porsche. Every few years they release a new base model version of the 911. This in turn is released in serveral forms: 911 Turbo, 911 Turbo Cabriolet, 911 Carrera 4S, 911 Carrera 4, 911 Carrera, 911 Targa, 911 GT2, 911 GT3, 911 RS. When Porsche come to design the next car in the 911 series, they pick and choose the best features from all the variants and make a new base release. The design, development and release is a never ending process. Porsche reliabilty is one of the best. I think our apps should be like this. Imagine what would happen to their sales if Porsche said, well the car works, it gets from A to B our and users haven't ask for any more than that. They would become a joke.

Users and management will never be prepared to dip into their pockets to upgrade if we can not show them a vision. When your management approached you, you should have done your enhancements to the other app, but also have convinced them that they need to upgrade VFP. Not doing so, would leave them without vital business benefits. This should have been done to the extent that their tongues were hanging out and they were willing to invest not only your time, but other peoples time in IT. Your last message makes me sincerely believe you missed a good opportunity to convice your management, and get them excited by VFP and the good job that the VFP camp has done over the last few years.

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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.
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>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
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>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.