>>>I don't think so. I think it was simple economics. VFP sales decreased to the point that the business unit couldn't support itself (or it was close to it)

Perhaps their marketing was bad and that caused sales to decrease. Perhaps they wanted to mirgrate people into SQL, and VFP was just a competing product in the same company. VFP sales going down could have been solved by the Microsoft marketing machine. They also could have moved VFP to a 64-bit compiler (I am intimately familar with writing compilers from 16 bit to 32 bit, having done so personally)---nothing Microsoft could not handle.

>>>My Microsoft certification is old...based on VS 6.0.

I did not at all mean any challenge to you, no offense was meant. But it is in your title, rightfully it should be.

>>>>Correct. But, here's how I arrived at my thoughts. Let's say the Dynamics group walked over to the DevDiv and said, "You know, there are lots of FoxPro accounting apps out there. If you kill VFP, it would help us." If it happened that way, then I could see justification for following through with an anti-trust claim. I just don't see that it worked out that way. Most of the non-DevDiv Microsoft people I've talked to over the years said, "FoxPro??? Do we still make that??"

Perhaps you spoke with naive players who didn't see the larger corporate picture. The battleground after the short war with Borland turned to Oracle and SQL very quickly. VFP stood in the way of SQL installations. I think that came first. Then Microsoft's purchase of GP, Nav, etc... Nonetheless, if you own the iron works and the railroads and your competition needs the rails and can't move their iron because you locked them out of your railroads... that's a monopoly, I think, I'm not a lawyer either.

>>>>I don't think my business situation does, but the product I work on does compete with a Microsoft product. But let's say your entire business is based on a single product that does compete. Do you stop selling your product for a year while you rewrite? I don't think so.

Who said we've stopped selling? But the Microsoft marketing engine claims the latest technologies... if you don't have it, customers will wonder why you're behind... Microsoft isn't ever behind the times...

>>>>Microsoft has been hinting for years that we should start looking at .Net. For years, many in the VFP community have been saying that eventually VFP would go away. It's not like the announcement from MS was a total surprise. If you weren't working on retooling, that's your fault.. not Microsoft's.

Hmmm.... why would a company purchase a product for millions (was it hundreds of millions) and then hit just a few years later they were shutting it down? Hmmmm...... No, this was no surprise, in fact, I think my company waited until the right time, when .NET / Visual Studio was mature enough to be considered a realistic platform (2005). And I really like what they have done with the c# platform and the libraries, my only complaint there would be documentation.

Be well.