>>>Hi Hilmar,
>>>
>>>one point that I haven't seen made is that improvements in the IDE in the later versions alone could justify the upgrade. The developers could upgrade, but still compile in the older versions (once they've not used any of the new language constructs).
>>
>>I am well aware that there are worth-while improvements in the newer versions. The real question was, in actual practice, why do many people stick to older versions, despite these improvements. I have my reasons; other people might have others.
>
>Hi Hilmar,
>
>We skipped VFP7. (This was before my time at this company, but I agree with the decision.) VFP7 SP1 introduced a bug that nearly doubled index sizes. Once most of our clients were upgraded with plenty of disk space, it was time to upgrade to VFP8 anyway so we skipped a version.
>
>Since we're vertical market app, a new runtime is always a considered decision. We never know when ONE of our client systems will surface a new incompatibility nobody has seen before. (I can actually predict which three people will have problems! <g>)
>
>We would have upgraded to VFP9 already but I knew there would be a SP1. We didn't want to suffer the "new runtime" distribution twice in such a short period.
>
>It's simple logistics. Stability is more important to us than being on the latest version, and a new runtime always introduces the air of instability.

Do you have an estimate of how many customers you guys have?