Christof

Thanks for sharing your insight into the situation. What you say certainly make much sense.

Regards

-=Gary


>Hi Gary,
>
>>It seems that a lot of Fox devs seem to be placing high hopes on the "ethnologica" offering to keep themselves relevant going forward
>
>As someone who is creating a similar product... <s>
>
>There are a number of reasons why going on with VFP in some way is reasonable. VFP being the only language in the world that works for business applications isn't one of them, at least not for me. In my experience, the developer makes a much bigger difference than the tool.
>
>If you are working in a company that pays for your education and you constantly work on new projects, or if you do consulting in various different companies, you are much more likely to switch to whatever tool is desired at that time. And there's nothing wrong with that.
>
>However, a huge number of VFP developers, at least in my experience, aren't like that, but fall into three groups:
>
>a) Own or work for a small company that sells one major business product. Revenue comes from selling licenses and support contracts. Minimizing support efforts by not requiring any server configuration is crucial.
>
>b) Be in charge of a small "IT department" in a company. Sometimes it's only a half-time job aside from the real job, sometimes there are one or two other people. As "the IT guy" this developer is responsible for maintaining all the IT infrastructure, writing business applications of all kind, and usually needs to do this inexpensively since small companies don't have a real IT budget.
>
>c) are not necessarily as young as I am and have been through several technology changes already. After working 30 years in this area going from punch cards to object orientation and web services, many of these developers simply don't want to start all over again, invalidate all knowledge they gained, feel like a stupid beginner, loose all security in doing things a certain way, wasting time by looking up every detail in the help file. At least not if the time to retirement is only 10-15 years away.
>
>In the first two cases (especially the first one) there has been a high investment in existing code. Code that is working, fully debugged and does what the client wants. There's absolutely no technical reason, why this investment should be wasted. After all, we're talking here about throwing away a value in the six or seven figures. Moreover, a migration to .NET is usually risky since you have to cut down on development on the existing version for a long period and inevitable end up with a new product that is slower than the previous one and lacks some features. It might have a bunch new features and might run reasonable on any modern computer. But customers rarely buy a new computer when they install a new version, they don't want to learn a new UI and certainly they need this one little feature that you decided to drop, because there are only some that actually use it.
>
>It's about being able to save the investment even when new computers don't happen to support VFP 9, or when new platforms come up.
>
>In addition, at least outside the US and some parts of Europe, there's the hardware and license requirements that are in favor of VFP. You don't new a Core 2 Duo machine with 2 GB of RAM to run a VFP application reasonable well. You don't need to buy a dedicated server machine, SQL servers, and the like. VFP works on old hardware with the VFP license being the only investment. If such a license is several month worth of your income and your customers have to decide between being able to afford a new computer or school fees for the kids, these are important factors. That's IMO one reason why we see a raise in VFP developers outside the "rich countries".