>>>>>Yesterday in a meeting with a new face at a Client's office he said "FoxPro is the software no one uses any more". Fortunately someone else remarked that the main purpose of the software was to get the job done and that it was doing the job very well.
>>>>>
>>>>>You all must have come across this situation. What answers have you given and what software have Clients suggested as being better than VFP and for what reasons?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>Would you buy a new car that the dealer won't support? Would you buy a major appliance with no warrenty? Would you invest in decades old technology when something newer exists?
>>>>
>>>>I made my living for 15 years using FoxPLUS to VFP. It was a great tool. It was.
>>>>
>>>>No company in their right mind would invest in a product that has no future. Remember, companies investing in IT infrastructure, software included, want to be cutting edge and forward looking. VFP has been retired so it's no longer a viable solution.
>>>
>>>My clients invest in my solutions to their business problems - they don't care what tools I use - they want their business processes to be "want to be cutting edge and forward looking"
>>
>>If you developed an app in VFP for them, then 3 years from now a problem occurs that exists in VFP, and MS won't talk to you about it, your client would suddenly care alot. I remember having this talk with a client of mine when Fox2.6 Win went out Tool most certainly
>>matters, at least from a maintainability standpoint.
>
>I've never had a problem with VFP that I've had to deal with MS over - so that's academic - anyway in 3 years time .Net could be out of fashion in favour of somat else

Just out of curiosity, I recently fired up an old Foxpro DOS program on my current Windows Vista machine. That puppy ran like a SOB, since there was very little processing required for the UI. True, the DOS UI left something (ok, a lot) to be desired in today's standards, but the fact remains that a program written in retired version of Foxpro some 20 years ago for a retired OS platform continues to run today on the most modern Windows platforms. Kudos, by the way, to Microsoft for being sticklers for backward compatibility -- try achieving the same on a Mac! Of course, Microsoft has paid a heavy price for that (Vista), whereas Mac OS has cut its ties to the past many times and moved on to become this extremely efficient and beautiful UI (for which Mac developers have paid. and will continue to pay, a high price.)

Unfortunately, though, nobody out there would want to buy my old Foxpro/DOS program because it "looks old", a criticism that has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that it does what it is supposed to do, the calculations it performs are 100% accurate AND it gets the job done in much less than half the time as the same program translated into VFP UI.

Boy do I sometimes feel like a Luddite! But then again, we know what happened to Luddites. Gotta embrace change and progress, even if at times it doesn't seem to make any sense.


What does this mean? Functionally: nothing; Commercially: everything.