>I almost totally agree except for one major point. While you can continue to run the existing VFP for some indefinite amount of time on current harware, what happens when future hardware/OS software (several generations maybe) prevents that from running?

No doubt that this is probably the primary reason why Microosoft is making this decision to not move forward. The VFP code base is VERY old - it's 20 year old code Win32 C code. This is not code that gets easily moved up to new technologies. Also some design decisions some time ago (like using its own Window Manager) are now becoming a big problem as any OS change affects the behavior of VFP and it not picking up the OS features automatically.

Could it be done? Sure - products like Office get rev'd for new versions of the OS specifically. Could it be done with a small team of 5 coders or less as VFP has been running for years? Doubtful...

If you threw a good chunk of money and resources at the problem this could be addressed, but that won't happen. These issues really date back to pre-2000 if you think about it and there's a reason issues like the 2 gig limit, native Windowing, Unicode integration etc. haven't been addressed in all that time and it's that these would require almost a complete rewrite of VFP.

Again - what's in it for Microsoft to do this? Microsoft didn't give in to VB6 crowd (as they well shouldn't have) and they surely won't give in to the much, much smaller VFP community.

Microsoft made its bet on .NET and given the adoptance rate and acceptance of the technology not just because it's the Microsoft default but because many developers like the architecture I'd say that that bet paid off. There was a lot of grumblign initially and probably for good reason as there's a steep learning curve for people coming from other technologies. However, the same is not true for NEW developers who start from scratch anyway and even now many of those same developers grumbling early on (including myself) are
reaping the benefits of the platform and are enjoying it.

I suspect the same might be true for anything else whther you move on to Java, PHP/Python, Ruby or whatever. In the end switching tools is a difficult thing to do - to go from 'knowing everything there's to know about it' to ' I don't know squat ' is never a pleasant experience (in fact I was just reminded of this as I was working with a very smart Fox developer last week who's struggling with simple language concepts in C#). But it's a hurdle that one gets over and then and only then does the benefit kick in.

It's like that with EVERYTHING in life.