>Forgive me if I am dredging up a topic that’s been discussed.
>
>I’ve been working with VFP, well, dBase, since the early 80s, then Clipper, then VFP. It’s been a 24-year experience with several breaks here and there as an assembly language programmer (I used to write compilers for years).
>
>Now I’m moving nicely into c#, liking it, things are going well, my company is converting VFP applications to c#, it’s a year long effort… but we’re moving right along, making the investment, like you are too probably. Visual Studio is a nice product.
>
>Lately I’m noticing, with increasing frequency, Microsoft now has many applications that compete with my company’s applications. I see Microsoft has retail management software, wholesale and manufacturing software, etc… These are products with the Microsoft nametag (including but not limited to Dynamics, Navision, RMS, Great Plains, etc…).
>
>So while my company is taking a year off to convert from VFP to c#, Microsoft sells competing products in my market. And oh, incidentally, it’s a coincidence they knocked out a lot of competing products written in VFP by discontinuing the VFP language (which they paid millions for ten years earlier).
>
>Since my company pays a lot of taxes (a lot to me) and has a bunch of employees, I contacted my state’s senators regarding monopolistic and unfair practices, specifically regarding the VFP language shut-down, which puts companies with VFP products at least a year behind competing Microsoft products. I’m not a lawyer, but it seemed unfair to me.
>
>My contact was well received (by one of them, the other one was very busy) and my issue was sent (CC me in writing) to the DOJ and several other federal agencies. In fact, I received letters from each agency stating it was being past along to a different office for review since it was not for their department…
>
>All of this was well over one year ago… needless to say, nothing has happened. Not surprised either.
>
>I was thinking of contacting the senators (the busy one may not be so busy any more) again to ask, through the freedom of information act, to see the results of the investigation, but I don’t really think it matters.
>
>Sorry guys, I guess I’m just venting.
>
>Any of you seeing patterns in the sand like I am or have I been programming just a wee bit too long? Set me straight.

Let's push this a little further. While we struggle to find the right (new) development environment and that we also struggle when we find that environment (let's say .net) MS already knows all there is to know when making those .net apps. Heck how could it be different they made it. So we're competing against a monster who has thousands of developers and will also know faster than us how to do things the right way.

They sell us the buggy stuff. They're working with the RC stuff. Oh yeah because they care about us and they don't want us to work with the buggy stuff too long <g>. Anyways They're releasing when their apps are ready. Or they wait a couple of months to make believe that their competition with us is fair LOL (they have to make sure that they're really ahead of us) and then they launch their official apps and their development environments.

When I have something that I can't figure out with VFP I come to the UT and usually it's a matter of seconds before I receive help.

The worst thing that happened to MS was the VFP community. Not the VFP community per say but a community. As a group we managed to help one another. It's still the case thanks to web site as the UT and the FoxWiki. A group can cause problems to MS. When there is a group of 10000 developers (as an example) all looking for the same solutions you can compete with MS. When there are 10000 developers looking for a solution in .net but 10000 developers not giving feedback to a group because they're all looking without being aware that they're not alone looking for it you could end up with the frustrated developer that finds the answer and keeps it to himself because he lost a lot of time finding that solution. MS likes it that way because they don't have to compete with a .net community.

MS knows how a community works. They saw how it worked with VFP. From day one they could've created a web place to repeat what they saw happening with VFP. I see this as a rather simple thing. MS creating a web site (http://microsoft.com/dotnetcommunity) and then you make sure that every .net developers know that this will be the place to find solutions. Perhaps something based on the UT. MS could've bought UT from Michel and he could've retired with all the millions MS gave him.

It's the last thing MS wants. they want us to work individually. We can't compete with them that way.



Who am I to say that MS works that way. I'd do things that way if I had all the protection MS has. Oh yeah monopoly charges. It'll be many many years before we see other actions being taken against MS for monopoly practives. The government gave us our cookies the last time. So everybody's happy and they (the government) can say that MS is doing things the right way now, This is a world economy. A much bigger picture than what we see. We have to compete with enterprises that don't respect many things. So perhaps the way MS plays in the market is the only way to survive when you're that big. I guess that's why many of us (developers) have that hate/like relationship with MS. We like the tools but we hate the way MS plays with us.