>I also agree with your comments about revenue, with one slight difference: companies may reduce profits or even wear a loss if it brings strategic value. So MS gave away IE for free for strategic reasons. MS lost a fortune on the Xbox but wore it for strategic reasons. And what about Win XP: with production costs fully recovered, profits and revenue must be immense from businesses and game-players wanting to keep buying XP. But MS still canned it- for strategic reasons, of course, and because they believe punters will select another MS product.

I agree that VFP was not a strategic product for MS directly. But VFP certainly contributed to the core engine development of MS SQL and Access (I understand that the core technology of VFP was migrated to these products). My feeling was, that as long as VFP was contributing directly to the other product core technologies (which probably ended in the 90's) and essentially paying for the "lights" consumed by the development team, it would last. But at some point MS was bound to kill it -- it wasn't strategic in their plans (as witnessed when VFP was pulled from studio back around v7).

I don't think it has anything to due with the fact that developers can build an application in VFP, deploy, and never use MS SQL. This can be done with any tool that MS has -- Visual Basic, .Net, C++, etc. So that is not a valid reason in my belief. It was simply not a strategic platform -- in many ways, VFP is too different from the other tools. This makes it a 'Red-Headed Step Child'. I think MS initially bought Fox Software for VFP's data engine, not for the FoxPro product. The product just came along for the ride. The fact that FoxPro survived this long and was able to mature to the point it is, is in my opinion, actually remarkable (or more likely it was a condition of sale between Fox Software and Microsoft). I was never sure why VFP ever made it beyond 2.6a. I think the original FP engine was 32 bit on the Watcom compiler under Win16 (Windows 95). So MS already had a 32 bit data engine that was ported to MS SQL and Access -- why keep FoxPro?

As for the "Condition of Sale" - this may be the answer. I don't remember the exact time of sale -- it was somewhere around the early 90's. Since VFP's demise was announced last year (2007), if you go back 15 years, this places you in 1992. This would be close to the time of sale of Fox Software. I would guess that the condition was that Microsoft had to support FoxPro as a product for 15 years minimum.