>>Yet I'll bet dollars to dimes that if they were talking to a client and that client said "well, I produced my product and it's available for sale, but I'm not getting many sales, I guess that's all the buyers' fault", they'd be sure to ask about the marketing. And when that client said "I'm not doing any", I'm sure they'd tell him the lack of sales is his own fault, not the buyers'. But in this case, to a community that they supposedly love and support, they do just the opposite and make the illogical and patently false accusation that it's the buyers fault. This is cluelessness defined!
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>It was a factor, perhaps, but not the driving factor. Not a factor that really made a difference. I note you did not address my analogy above. Is that what you'd do? Would you side with the customer who is not marketing and tell that customer "it's really your customer's fault"? Blame it on the prospect when you're not bothering to market the product? That's exactly what's going on here. Kramek, Akins, and Pountney -- you too? -- are just blaming it on the community when M$ has done very, very little to market or otherwise support this product (beyond the mostly heroic efforts of the dev team itself).

I think there were lots of factors. I think the failure of uptake by the community was a factor that made it hard for the team to argue for new versions.

In my view, VFP 8 and 9 were essentially successes of the team and the community (including MVPs) to get Microsoft to buy in. The JFAST stuff was a factor there, too.

When sales of VFP 8 and 9 were low, it made it hard for the team to argue against management for another release. Huge sales of 9 would have provided an argument that there was still money to be made.

All that said, absolutely, declining sales are the result of Microsoft's failure to market outside the Xbase community.

Tamar