>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).>

Regardless of its technological merits, if a product no longer fits strategically or financially, it is going to be tough to attract or retain people to work in what is, essentially, a backwater area of a large company. Just for grins, assume that MSFT, instead of killing VFP, had spun it off into the New Entrepreneurial Fox Software Company, along with a confidential technology sharing agreement, retained a 25% stake, and let it succeed or fail entirely on its own merits. Do you think that a sufficient, qualified Fox team could have been assembled or retained to take that plunge? Seems to me that, to the extent that such a venture was very or only slightly (by MSFT standards) financially successful, MSFT still wins, because of its stake and because the product, its developers and its customers remain happy and, ultimately, hitched to the MSFT wagon.

-mark