>>I wonder what it will be, do we keep on cursing the darkness? or will we burn a candle?
>>Looking forward to your replies.
>
>Boudewijn --
>
>I for one appreciate your volunteer efforts and your positive outlook. Thank you for that!
>
>However, in the commercial world perception often is 50% of reality --- many great products have died on the wine because the providing company paid all attention to development and no attention to PR. Communicating effectively, controlling/managing expectations (up and down) and being transparent -- the buzzword of the day here in the U.S. -- is extremely important. This is where eTec has seriously stumbled, IMO -- I just can't believe that for example refreshing a weekly status update (or maybe starting a simple development blog with background information, news and "stories from the engine room") on eTec's website would take up enough resources to negatively impact ongoing product development.
>
>Given the unchanging, stale website and very little or no communication for months on end, it is no wonder that folks are getting restless and seeing that "candle" flicker and hope wane. eTec has been at this for well over 2 years now, and IMO they haven't managed expectations well at all -- there have been many promises of "imminent close-to-complete" VFP compatibility over the years, but at least my experience has been that every &#$$&# time I download a new version and start to (excitedly) explore the new features that came with it, I run into a show-stopper-morale-buster bug sooner rather than later. Eventually, there comes a point when one stops banging his/her head against the wall and moves on to a more established, stable, transparent and well managed platform.
>
>And last but not least, since this is not an open-source project, it would take some serious blind faith to make far reaching technology decisions that have serious business continuation implications when the underlying technology (code) is owned, governed and managed by a company that doesn't even publish its mailing address or phone number. Given the closed nature of this project, when we as end-users run into a bug, the best we can do is report it, hope for the best and wait (and wait, and wait) for a fix.
>
>Don't get me wrong, I applaud this effort and wish eTec all the best, and maybe some day they will reach the perfect storm of compatibility, stability, public relations/expectation management and corporate size to effectively rescue the stragglers that are still floating around after VFP Titanic has gone down for good to the bottom of the Sea of Great Expectations. As it is, most of those stragglers are rapidly being picked up by MS VisualStudio (a pun!), so the time is running out.

Excellent message. I had the same thought that it wouldn't take long to post an occasional status update. 5 minutes? 10 minutes? Clearly the perception that eTec is uncommunicative is hurting their reputation here.