>I don't buy that analogy thou. Something that's always stuck in my mind is an editorial I read in Advisor mag a longtime ago. The author was discussing software purchases as a pyramid. With developers at the point, there are fewer developers then users, who are at the bottom. The author was discussing software marketing, including development tools.
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>And how you could look and see that because there are far more users then developers you would think that you should market towards users. But the author pointed out that this would be an invalid assumption because of how the choice of development tool is almost always made by the developer. So in this case the tip of the pyramid drives the bottom part.
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>I just don't think that many people work with a software tool if they don't find it that comfortable to do.
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>I think in many cases the user base for Dotnet and Java is so hugh because those are the choices for what's taught in most schools these days. I was just reading an editorial from the "Angry Programmer" where he states that he thinks it's wrong that many universities have slimmed down their IT offering to only include Java as the tool. He thinks that you can't be a real programmer unless you know how to design sorting algorithms, etc. from scratch.
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>Because something like VFP diverges from a tool like Java in some important areas, most developers will never like VFP. That's why you see people refering to it as "old technology". And obviously now that thought process will never change.
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I think one of the problems VFP has had in the perception arena is that to many people, meaning those who have not used it, it *is* old technology. They think of dBASE III and don't realize how much VFP has advanced from that.