Hi Al,

as I read the article, he's not describing the quality of the products (although that's an unfortunate set of products to be a part of), but rather that MS throws away money on products: "I say "useless profits," because Microsoft throws away so much money on misguided acquisitions and dead-end investments." He then goes on to list some examples, FoxPro among them.

And indeed, FoxPro was a dead-end investment, unless one counts the acquisition of Rushmore, which may have been the only piece they had an interest in. Although when they bought Fox, Ashton-Tate was a competitor in the business app development tools market (who knew they had reached the end of their rope?).

Did Fox have to be a dead-end investment? Of course not. It was first or best on a lot of fronts (Visual OOP; XML integration; SQL Server integration; etc.), and it was only the lack of development $ that kept it from flourishing. MS had to counter Java with C#, and that meant .Net 1.0, in which VFP could not in fact have been written. It could have been written (with some effort) in .Net 2.0 (Frank Camp wrote ASELOBJ() in 2005 using 2.0, which I had been told by an MS PM could not be done in .Net), but by then it was too late.

So, what Dvorak is saying is I think accurate. But of course FoxPro as a technically successful product doesn't belong in that list of (generally: I know someone who really liked her WebTV) half-baked losers.

Hank

>http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2355644,00.asp