SNIP
>>
>>Still, no matter how I look at it, VFP's future is long and strong yet. Medium/small businesses should remain a huge market (as long as North America's ultimate destination isn't trading used WalMart goods on eBay run from China) and while they are VFP will be their best bet by far.
>>I see the one possible fly in the ointment (aside from everything being in China) as being Word+SQLServer becoming a viable replacement for programming in general. My bet is that this is closer than anyone thinks.
>
>Why would that be? If that happens, even the Microsofties will be out of a job.

I've been thinking about this since I wrote the statement and I've come to the conclusion that someone could do the very basics using VFP+VBA even today.
Word "forms" (or whatever they call them) had some reasonably powerful capabilities even when I did a few several years ago. Since then they've been endowed with several new features making them even more powerful. And soon XML and who knows what else.
I don't think Microsoft particularly cares about Microsofties being out of a job. They just want to rule the computing world one way or the other and squeze every buck out that they can. If they can do it with 10% of the programmers they have now, so much the better (for them).

PS We agree on lots of things. It's the little stuff, like today's 'don't forget Microsoft's IronPython', that irritates.