>Hi, Peter.
>
>>My argument is that you will nowhere in the eulas of MS find any guarantee that they will continue support for .NET, Windows and SQL Server for as long as they exist as a company. And I also are paranoid enough to assume they also nowhere promise that future OSs will be fully downward compatible with legacy systems.
>
>What vendor or Open Source initiative provide you with a guarantee?
>
>Very few development platforms have been kept for as much as 20 years (counting from Fox Software days), and what they will stop developing later this year is a pretty stable product.
>
>Any company with a huge product and customer base and a clear product roadmap which didn't look further than VFP in the last few years has a management problem in my opinion. And this doesn't mean that they can't keep providing excellent products using VFP, but mainly that they aren't keeping their chances properly aligned with the market.

I think you are confusing things here. Criteria differ for IT companies as compared to othertype companies. An (hypothethical or not) othertype company, possibly a customer of the IT company or a company with a VFP IT department and several other-language departments, has decided in the past to do development of a set of applications with VFP. And in all past years they were able to upgrade those applications. And now they feel forced to have those applications rewritten entirely. Such a company doesn't necessarilly have a management problem. They have a problem due to a decision that another company (MS) made. They have been trusting MS too much a number (2, 5, 10) of years ago. They will feel relief for the fact that their other applications have not been built in VFP, often because they refused to listen to VFP adepts.