Craig, I think I mostly agree with every point you made here. Be well.

>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.

I agree. The marketing was bad. But it wasn't inept. When inept, the person just doesn't know what they are doing and screws up. What little marketing there was was done on purpose. Both Robert Green and Ken Levy took their marching orders from above and carried them out. Ken took alot of the heat, but his hands were tied.

>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.

Could be. I only know what the team told me. It would take a HUGE amount of work and would break existing apps. I don't know if that's true or not. But think about this in context with my previous statement on marketing. Do you think Ken was the only team member who knew the end was coming? Do you think the team itself made the decision to kill the product? It all came from above.

>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.

Then why not Access? There are far more copies of Access sold than VFP. And just like VFP, Access has its own database and royalty free runtime.

>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.

It's flawed thinking. If you're the only iron works, then you have a case. But you can go elsewhere to get your tools.

Look at all the component vendors who sold OCXs for VB 6.0. Many of those components competed with ones that shipped in the VB 6.0 box. Things like text boxes, treeviews, listboxes, etc. If your logic is correct, then they have the same case against MS for killing VB 6.0 and bringing out an imcompatable technology in .Net.

>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...

Ummm... yes. They have been. How long did it take them to embrace the Internet? If they always have the latest, then how come Windows isn't writting in .Net? Or Office? Or SQL Server? In fact, the Visual Studio IDE shell is written using good old COM.

>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?

Because they didn't buy it for the product. They bought it for the technology and the customer list. Rushmore was put into Jet. The VFP cursor engine was used as the basis for ADO..

>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.

I'm glad to hear you're enjoying it. I really like C# and VS. And I agree with you on the docs.