What if the answer turns out to be "The customer base is now too small to justify expenditure on developing the product"?

Looking at the math: YAG has described 10s of thousands of VFP developers. I'm assuming he means VFP9 sales, since most observers are still saying VFP developer numbers in the 6-figures.

Lets pick a number- say $100 - representing margin per copy sold after distribution and packaging costs are deducted.

If there are 20,000 sales, that's $2M. If you allow $1M for salaries and accommodation for Calvin et al, there's still room to turn a profit.

Maybe somebody here has better numbers... but IMHO there'd be a profit if sales are into the tens of thousands.

Whatever the profit is, MS will have to compare it to the cost of maintaining a competing product that has not moved across to NET. They'd also look at the chances of people moving to NET rather than some other platform.

I remember Ken Levy warning us for years that the best way to support VFP was by buying every release. Perhaps if we'd all bought an extra copy, we might have exercised more control over our destiny. ;-) Or (perhaps more likely) this would have happened even if there were a million sales. At some point MS-knockers *will* start asking why VFP still exists if NET is so good. No danger of that now. ;-)

IMHO there are many more positives than negatives for VFP. It outlasted VB, which was a strategic product for much of FP's time as a MS product. And alternatives are *much* more mature now, compared to 2004 when prophets were saying "move- or else." IMHO MS did us a huge favor and we all owe a lot to the people who actually did that. How frustrating it must have been for them constrained by corporate policy and dearly wanting to *explain" rather than simply announce. IMHO you could see changes in communication style over the years as people slapped at MS reps because they couldn't (weren't permitted to) reveal certain explanations, but did their best to provide enough detail for us to figure it out ourselves.