>I've heard that MS aims to make $100,000 profit per full-time employee. It's a stale figure; it may be higher or lower now but the math is still interesting. Assuming it is approximately true, you'd be looking for $300K annually per VFP employee (1/3 profit, 1/3 business costs, 1/3 salary/benefits.) If you're not advertising widely or training the sales troops, you'd need a lot less than that. But lets say $300K. Assuming a base price of $200 you're looking at 1,500 sales of VFP per employee year. Assuming there's a new release every 2.5 years you're looking at 3,750 sales per version per full-time team member to exceed MS's profit expectation.

My *guess* is that you sorely underestimate the testing cost involved. Testing effort and cost grew much faster with size, complexity and possible interactions with HW on nearly all gigs I was involved. As MS has to test on a growing number of OS flavors the marketing decision of sellingwindows this way probably was one of the larger figures tipping vfp over the edge. In the largest gig I was involved in I was activeliy instumenting parts of the framework to be include larger parts into the automated testing, but this was a loosing battle. And even if "marketing" was between nonexistant and ridicolous, you bet that budgets were set aside in each country and happily spent otherwise<bg>.

>As an aside, a cynic would say the position MS is at today is a bit like the UK after WWII: after the victory the majesty is still there but the Empire is fragmenting into a Commonwealth of Nations pursuing their own goals and there are many more hands on the levers of power.

Micro-Hoo suggests the same

regards

thomas