>>He's blaming Microsoft for his own inabilities to follow what was happening with VFP. Any computer language/product can be discontinued. Delphi was once the latest and greatest. PowerBuilder was once the latest and greatest. You hardly hear about either of them now. Java? Oracle says they'll keep it, but Sun is losing $100 million per month. Larry, "I am God" Ellison could decide at anytime that Java costs too much to maintain and kill it. There have been thousands of Open Source projects come and go. Nothing to say it won't happen to PHP, Pytthon, Ruby and others.
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>Having spent many years using Microsoft stuff I learned to beware of buzzwords. Just the stuff that came into contact with VFP and were gone are numerous - ActiveDoc, DDE, embedding via general fields and merging menus. Not to mention things which just whizzed by.
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>Python may stay, it's around long enough; Ruby, I don't know, looks like a toy which does a few things great but may fail if you try to do what it doesn't advertise (just like most of the frameworks do, so what's new). I've seen some code written in JavaBeans few years ago - actually tried to see what's up with the app when the rest of the team was offline (and I don't speak Java... but can read code)... and I've decided that it's unnecessarily split into far too many levels, far too many files, making it essentially gobbledygook to me. Which may translate into maintenance cost down the road, so... I may agree that Java's days may be ending.
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>However, having tried out the full LAMP stack, I was amazed with the stability - not only in runtime, but also in features added. There weren't any eye candies, just your bread and butter coding tools, that I could set up and understand and have a few basic pages (with poor man's AJAX working) in a week. The ease of configuration, clarity of names of things, and easy search when running against a problem (because a query doesn't flood you with dozens of sales pitch articles as it does on Microsoft's sites)... if I have to switch platforms before retiring, that's where I'd go.
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>>Years ago one of the biggest names in the Fox world swore off Microsoft and publicly stated he was moving everything to Open Source. Guess what he's doing today... Fox ... because he couldn't make enough money with Open Source development.
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>The famous "FU, M$" scored more points in my mind than the usual "it's M$, what can we do - bend over" attitude. He gave a good fight, at least.

Re: "However, having tried out the full LAMP stack..." -- now, if they could only do away with case-sensitivity. A real bane!

Re: "it's M$, what can we do - bend over" attitude" -- or the worse attitude of "it's Microsoft, nothing they do should ever be questioned!"