>>Microsoft has bought Fox to spite Borland, then to milk it for technology, then eventually killed it for the meat - the ingenious team which did these miracles, they need these guys to fix up their mastodon project. Now they're still trying to lure all the fox's friends to buy into that project.
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>>I may eventually buy into that, if I have to, with the same pleasure that I had when I was doing Cobol. Before it comes to that, I plan to stay with Fox as long as I can.
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>I don't agree that Microsoft bought Fox to spite Borland.

Remember all those features that were included for compatibility with dBase IV? Functions with alternate names just to be compatible?

That was probably among the top five reasons for the purchase - of course not the only one.

>It seems like a long time ago now but they were genuinely in a battle to be the #1 development tools vendor. And I don't think Fox could have advanced FoxPro the way Microsoft did. If you look at VFP 9 compared to FoxPro 2.5, they took it light years forward.

Sure they did, but it never was their flagship product. It was, as Les Pinter said, Microsoft's best kept secret.