Imagine the position of a person looking for employment utilizing dBase skills.

I can't. ;-)

I never had much interest in dBase, though at one point I did a mini-review to see what Jeff Winchell was talking about.

As I recall, Access was released while the beta for FPW was underway. Meanwhile dBase 5.0 was delayed and delayed and delayed until when it was finally released, most of us had already selected a Windows development tool. I think Access was the main beneficiary. That's how I remember it anyway. ;-) By 1994 Borland was promoting its upcoming Delphi against FP, taking some of us to international conferences to see how cool it is. It was indeed cool... but the VFP beta was cooler.

There's no doubt that MS did a remarkable job with VFP3. I was privileged to be on the Beta and to find enough bugs to earn a free copy, allowing me to deploy the first live 32-bit Windows app on the planet when Win95 was released at midnight 30 August 1995, with NZ's midnight occurring before the rest of the world. Being young and naive I expected MS had great plans to market its hot new database product. I think the rest of the story is well known. ;-)