You have it wrong. Microsoft saw declining revenue for many years and at the same time decided to concentrate on .NET. So, they decided to give VFP a slow death. If anything, we got lucky that MS continuing as long as they did.

IMO, if VFP had stayed part of Visual Studio, we would have gotten a .NET version, but the VFP community clearly said they wanted to be unbundled. So, Microsoft gave us exactly what we asked for.

>No, it's an excuse and you're foolish if you believe it. Say you get tired of the balloon floating around the house that your kid loves to play with, so you put a teeny hole in it to ensure that soon it's deflated. Then you throw it away and tell the kid that you had to because all the air leaked out. That's all M$ did. They stopped advertising the product, they stopped talking about it, except for the dev team, it was ignored. They sent the message and turned their back knowing what would happen. Then after awhile they turned around and said "oh, look everyone's gone, got to kill it." As if they didn't know what would happen. If they advertised it, talked about it, positioned it as the great front-end for SQL server that it was, and/or raised the price the revenue would have been there. They didn't try and they got what they were aiming for. They let the air out of the balloon and refused to acknowledge why that happened. And the most amazing thing is that some people actually believe them.