I've worked mostly on vertical market apps and all in cases, the issue of the development tool has come up numerous times. Sometimes the customer will ask and consider it, othertimes it will be brought up by the competition.



>Not sure I agree with some of your points Tracy. I think it depends on the type of product one is offering to the market.
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>If you are offering programming services, either as a contractor or as an employee, then the development tools you use will of course play a large role in whether you get the work or not.
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>But if you are offering off-the-shelf applications then we find that even in the largest of corporates that the end-users don't even ask what its written in. They couldn't care less, its a non-issue, not even on their radar. They just want the data and the functionality that the application provides.
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>Occasionally the IT guys might ask but they usually just shrug their shoulders and have a "whatever" attitude so long as the app doesn't give them more work than what they already have.
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>>That is the key problem. It is now the case of:
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>>What you see is what you get Period.
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>>Also, all the "VFP is out to pasture" in the media will have an impact on future business. Anyone who doesn't have long-term customer commitments and relies on new sales will be forced to switch over to another tool or lose those sales.
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>>There will always be mom and pop shops that will buy a product not caring what tool was used to develop it in. Day by day though even the mom and pop shops are becoming more savvy. As other developers try to win their business the competition now has a strong upper hand on winning that sale. Even if the new sale goes to a VFP developer, down the road, if they ask for new features that cannot be accomplished in VFP, then it will require separate modules (or dare I say it COM?) in another language to accomplish it.
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>>Right now it looks like the best avenue for the future of VFP will be in whatever etechnologia can get done (and Sedna).
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>>>the mayor problem is not the Product its the customer
>>>if you tell them using VFP some will say you use some outdated tool.
>>> So we have to start using a litle bit Net or wahtever around and with VFP, that we can tell people we use Net and other tools.
>>>dirk