>IMO he has a legitimate question, especially when it comes to sticking with MS or moving to other platforms that are "strategic" to their vendors, whatever that means and however each company understands it. Is it reasonable to ask Microsoft reps a question like this this AND expect the answer? Probably not (the last part), but it never hurts to ask, just in case.

Sure that is a good point, and certainly if you actually feel 'abandoned' by Microsoft you should check out non-Microsoft avenues.

But I'd advise to look past the politics and look at what makes sense for your business. It's easy to say i'll switch to PHP and run on Linux or start using J2EE for my Web applications out of spte for Microsoft, but that world is a COMPLETELY different culture and community and paradigm. This can be a good or bad thing and possibly one of the advantages is that much of the stuff is open source so there's never really a threat of a product being abandoned (although I would argue that most open source projects are on 'abandoned' status 90% of the time <s> with the big visible exceptions).

The point is that Microsoft has not been hiding the facts from you and me and there are plenty of options that you have for development INCLUDING continuing on with VFP. In my opinion this announcement hasn't changed anything at all that was implicitly true after the release of VFP 9 almost 2 years ago.