>While Microsoft has achieved some innovations over time, for the most part they are a marketing/sales company. What Microsoft has always >been best at is "leveraging" ideas and technology from others, repacking it, then marketing and selling it better than their competitors.

IMHO, what Microsoft has been best at is leveraging a de facto OS monopoly into winning a lot of product competitions that it would not have otherwise won. Against that reality (which, of course, has been changing with the growth of Google, and would have begun changing years ago if 500-some votes had been different in Florida), it's somewhat ironic to see MSFT pull the plug on a best-of- breed (albeit initially bought-in) product. Even if legitimate concerns with protecting intellectual property preclude VFP from ever being open-sourced, I wonder if MSFT, short of killing it, could have found a way to productively spin it off, retain a royalty interest, and let a small group/company devoted to its technical and commercial success run with it.

MSFT is, of course, a bottom-line business, and I don't begrudge them that. But, beyond the immediate bottom line, there is an opportunity cost that comes with orphaning products. As this thread illustrates, when loyal developers (and, in turn, their customers) get left in the lurch, they think long and hard about alternatives the next time around, rather than blindly giving you their loyalty again.

BTW, let me belatedly express my appreciation to you for the efforts that you and your team brought to the product over the years.

-mark