>Suppose a company has to decide THIS YEAR to either modernize its in-house-built VFP7 application that handles complex rules, or to choose for replacement with a standard application that only claims it can handle those complex rules...
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>What do you think will be the influence of the announcement made this week?
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>And how do you think developers and decision makers will currently feel if they had that decision to make LAST YEAR and chose to continue using VFP?

Complex applications don't get migrated overnight. Any project manager with a slight idea of what she is doing will prepare an evolutive path. Whenever you want to switch platform in a huge application, you first prepare a clear interoperability strategy, and then you start doing an incremental shift.

Over the last two versions VFP added a lot of interoperability features to let you play with .NET, Java or most any other modern platform, so this shouldn't be a problem.

Also, notice that you are talking about an presumably well-managed company which have a complex application still running in VFP 7, which is an obsolete product since a lot of time. That doesn't sounds smart enough.

Of course tons non-critical, legacy applications are still running on FPD and older technology, but this is a completely different story.