>>Seems to me that Microsoft is more of a "show me the money" company than a "make developers happy and engender loyalty" type company.
>>

>MS spent two years on Sedna, and they're giving it away. What category does that fit in?

The category that fits into is:
Senda serves to push the VFPers into bigger money stuff like MSDN annual subscriptions, and even more significantly, push all the VFPers' customers into SQL server licensing. Cha-Ching!