>>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.
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>I don't think so. Most of my work for the last 20 years has been around software projects for companies out of the IT industry. For most of them, change between platforms and tools is frequent and taken for granted.
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>In the accounting and administrative area, many companies got applications written in VB, for example. They had been changing the applications quite often between versions (and that wasn't like VFP plain recompiles, believe me), including changing data access from RDO to DAO to ADO, and so on. They changed their VB windows-based apps to ASP web sites, then -in many cases- back to windows as they couldn't meet their final goals, and so on...

As I see it happen, there are two motives that can drive management to switch:

1) They have new goals that require new features in the language/platform. Features that are (still) missing in the language/platform they already use. They hear of another language or platform that actually offers those features and decide to switch. (Sometimes to reluctantly switch back indeed, after significant failures.)

2) They are forced to switch, because 1] further development of the used language or platform is bound to cease, and 2] their company policy does not allow the use of technology that is no longer supported by the vendor.

Your 'taken for granted' refers to a different feeling in both motives.


>Something quite like that happened in the Java environment, with some important changes coming in every version, and with people going to EJBs, then back to POJOs when EJB got too much, from JDBC to Hibernate or other ORMs, from applets to servlets to JSP, and so on...
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>You probably don't want to know about the people who choose Delphi. They even experience the whole company behind the product changing its name back and forth...
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>No single vendor can guarantee stability. VFP was able to keep an incredible level of backward compatibility during the last 20 years and will keep going on for some 10 or 20 more, surely. But this is NOT something usual in the IT industry, and it has a big drawback, too, and it is that there is a lot of people who still code with VFP 9 in the same way that 20 years ago, even when the tool is very up-to-date.