>Piet,
>
>It wasn't strategic for years. It never made a lot of money for them, compared to their strategic products like VB, NET, SQL Server.


It's their own fault if it did not make a lot of money for them. They deliberately kept it in the background, and did little to promote it. They kept it going only for the existing Foxpro users.

It was never really given a sporting chance at being properly marketed to the public. Very few microsoft staff around the world even knew what it was.

Indirectly, I believe that Foxpro was responsible for a lot of sales of other microsoft products. Bean counters at microsoft probably never took this into account.