>>>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.
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>>Sure they did, but it never was their flagship product. It was, as Les Pinter said, Microsoft's best kept secret.
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>Yes, but that's marketing, not technology. I honestly don't think Fox Software could have done what Microsoft did with upgrades. They did a great job for a company operating out of a strip mall in Toledo, but come on!

As far as technology goes, kudos. Specially with the last two versions, which have pretty much everything I wanted, plus a few things I couldn't invent myself even as wishlist items.

But that's not just marketing - marketing is only a way of enforcing the basic strategy by other means. Marketing will go where the strategy aims it.

And now in retrospect the strategy looks like "ok we bought Fox Software, with all of its cool technology, and the great guys that made it and its faithful customer base... now we want these great guys to do other cool things for us, and we want to take over the customer base, those faithful programmers out there, we just need to make them buy (into) our other stuff, not Fox".

I once saw Fox vs VB as two kids of the same father (BG came to mind), Fox being the kid from a side adventure, and VB being the hopeful legal heir. When it turns out that the less legitimate child is the smarter and brighter one, it won't change a thing: we all know to whose graduation will the father go.