I think the customer base loyalty was yet another factor in how long VFP was extended beyond 6.0. But by the time VFP 9.0 was released, the amount of sales for all versions of VFP combined annually was less revenue than Microsoft sales of Visual Studio in only one day. The cost to evolve VFP relative to the amount of money it generated (ROI) was far less than putting more resources into VS and .NET languages. Plus, some Fox team members were ready to move on or leave Microsoft, and it was nearly impossible to find qualified people to replace them. The primary reason VFP was never made open source was to avoid the source code being used for a competitive product or to create/evolve a product that competes with VS. It helps to put this all into perspective if you think of VS as a competive product to VFP, even though it was owned by the same company. Remember when Apple worked on both the Mac and the Lisa computers at the same time, only one survived. In the case of VFP, it survived an entire decade after it was essentailly killed (by it no longer being strategic).

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