Agreed. If Borland had bought Fox (not sure they were interested) they would have just been buying market share IMO. They would have folded the features they liked into dBase. And I bet the joined product would have disappeared long before 2007.

Was Delphi around as early as 1992? For some reason I thought it was a couple of years later.

Did you ever work with Delphi? I did, for about a year, and really liked it. You could do anything in Delphi you could do in C but it was at the same time it was a much more friendly RAD tool. The only glaring weakness I remember was reporting. And there were 3rd party products to fill that niche.


>Hi, back again.
>
>You make a great point that I really had not thought about before!
>
>Back when MS bought Fox Software in 1992, there was this major competing product from Borland (originally Ashton-Tate) named Dbase III/IV that we all worried would eventually kill FoxPro. In addition Borland had some other amazing products like Delphi, better in a lot of ways than VFP or any other existing MS languages from a database developer's perspective.
>
>We never seem to think about what might have happened to Fox Software if MS had not bought it. Maybe someone can do the research, but I'm guessing that Fox Software's net profit and cash reserves were way below Borland's at the time. So if MS had not bought Fox Software and Borand had, would we even be having this conversation today?
>
>Assume that Borland, instead of Microsoft, had bought FoxPro from Fox Software. Go to the Borland.com web site and try to imagine Visual FoxPro 9.0 there along with their existing products. No way! VFP was a direct threat to Delphi and they probably would have killed it much earlier than MS has now done.
>
>Not that I am happy with the demise of VFP under Microsoft! But we need to keep our disappointment in persective. I'm skeptical that the alternate suitors would have done any better.
>
>>>I think that it's fairly clear - they want us to all move to .NET.
>>>>
>>>>They've been struggling to get a .NET community going anywhere near the strength of this one. Imagine a portion of this community eventually fighting as hard for .NET as we do for VFP.
>>>
>>>As JimN said (and I felt it too - remember how the M$ guys hijacked a Fox user group somewhere in Canada and all of a sudden it was supposed to be a .net group with all the giveaways), they can't build a community. Ballmer can do his dance all day long if he wants, but developers aren't just flies to gather arround any... sugar cube. They pick the one they like.
>>>
>>>>They need the VFP development guys to be working on .NET. They are CLEVER cookies. They don't want them to be distracted from .NET doing VFP development.
>>>>
>>>>I think that all of that's been out there to see for a few years now.
>>>
>>>I figure VFP was for a long time the main reason I had Windows on my machines. Still is.
>>>
>>>Once, during a job interview, I was asked about three strong and three week points in VFP. Don't remember exactly which one I picked for strong, but for weak I picked database vulnerability... and don't remember what were the other two. They should have been: Microsoft and Windows.
>>>
>>>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.
>>>
>>>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.
>>
>>
>>I don't agree that Microsoft bought Fox to spite Borland. 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.