Jim N.(:))!

Severe but courageous.

... and Mark Mc., do not be irrated. The airing or those (partly mine as you might know) opinions is what gives some credibility to this forum, inluding to your anwsers. Not all of us can (want?) to finish our careers at MS. :)

For those of us old enough and for what it's worth, remember that the once thought invincible IBM fired 2/3 of its staff (those are the figures for Belgium) somewhere in the early nineties. It's true that it got in trouble only after the 3rd gerenation of management took over, and Bill is still young and vigourous ...


Marc.


>Mark,
>
>An excellent response, but I do have some opinions to offer as regards some of it (intersperse). . .
>>>PS -- Wake up Microsoft! See VFP for what it really is...a Powerbuilder killer!
>>>
>>It's definitely a PB killer.
>>
>>Comment for another reply -- I disagree that people here are afraid to speak out or up to MS about VFP. There are many here who are in frequent with Robert Green and others at MS. These people have been made painfully aware of *our* side, opinions, needs (marketing, functional, etc.) and obstacles to selling VFP to customers.
>>
>The many here who imply that they are in frequent contact with Robert Green are, to a person and in my opinion, mouthpieces for Mr. Green and stalwart defenders of MS and Mr. Green. Frankly, they sound so much like they are being paid by MS that, if they are not, they clearly are brown--nosing fror whatever advantage they can get.
>
>
>>I have been a regular on this forum for over a year, and I have seen significant progress from MS over this time. Granted, I want to see more, but I will take what I can get.
>
>I can'r agree that there has been "significant" progress. We still see far to much of the rest of MS not even acknowledging the existence of VFP. This reported from seminar attendees and seen in advertisements.
>VFP 6. virtually *ignored* all user "wish list" items in favour of other developments. I strongly suspect that those who were listened to for VFP 6 content were those very same people who imply close connection with Mr. Green. Further, I would guess that that "input" was more along the lines of Mr. Green's folks suggesting things and those folks simply saying 'yea, great idea'. Or possibly third party vendors got all the input. One thing is ctystal clear - regular developers got *NO* say in any of it!
>
>> Our Agency, EPA has 10 Regional offices across the country and a national headquarters in Washington DC. EPA does not really have a development tools standard much less one for VFP. Our region selected VFP as our standard because of a competition we set up between Oracle's tools and VFP (I handled the VFP side). This went against all our other Regions and HQ who generally use PB, Oracle Power Objects, Developer 2000, Case Tools, etc. Visual dBase is the standard for our users to replace the dBaseIII DOS version (ugh). Our Region has bucked this by going to MS Access for general staff use for individual and very small databases. VFP is our standard for major DB apps. We use Oracle if we need more horses for a backend.
>>
>>And... you better believe people that *matter* at MS have seen sights and products like these (the UT, Web-Connect, Surplus City, etc) that are driven by VFP and are realizing how good the product is. The VFP Awards, although not completely inclusive of all possible contestants, is another good indication of progress.
>>
>There really is *no* evidence to support this. The VFP award had little or nothing to do with MS. Do you think the movie industry would care very much if People Magazine staged their own 'academy awards'? I doubt it. Same for MS.
>
>>Our heads are not in the sand. Enough alarms go off here when erroneous information is published, web sites are provided, and UT members jump over to these sites to *spam* these uninformed *journalists* with the facts on VFP.
>
>I did my best to let this dead horse lie, but a coupla things pushed me over the edge.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Jim N