I know no more about what's going on internally at Microsoft than anyone else.

I guess it depends who "anyone else" includes. ;-)

IMHO it pays to stop every few months and check our assumptions. Lets not forget that FP has been "threatened" since the early 1990s by a steady stream of modern, strategic technologies. Powerbuilder was probably the most credible. We had Java, every iteration of VB since 3.0, Delphi, Kylix, Python... the list goes on. As recently as 2006 we've been told that local data storage is no good, though the vast majority of US businesses rely on it for all their accounting, payrol and business records.

I agree that it seems improbable MS will ever bring VFP back into the fold, but MS is well aware of the millions of decisionmakers out there who are already using Linux on a PIII for company e-mail and PBX and see no good business reason for expensive upgrades to their 8-year-old hardware if there are cheap alternatives that run on what they have. This is the small business reality that MS says it wants to serve. How?

Starting from that point, differences of opinion about Sedna, CLR etc become very reasonable IMHO. I don't agree that people should be dissuaded from providing feedback to a MS rep who says it is taken into account when decisions are made.