>What I was saying was that lack of standardization didn't prevent VB from
squashing the competition, therefore I see no reason why lack of standardization would've prevented VFP from doing the same. In other words, there must be other factors (as I'm sure you agree).

Mark,

I think there is a difference. xBase has always been an also ran language as far as market size is concerned. BASIC has always been everyman's programming language. The evolution of GW and M BASIC into Visual BASIC was an evolutionary process.

The damage that VFP suffered from the lack of a standard is not directly related to the lack of a standard, but rather the failure of the IEEE committee to set a standard. A lot of major MIS houses were watching that committee, and when it failed to produce a standard that was seen as the demise of xBase. I don't think for a moment that this was the only thing involved with VFP's shrinking market. But VFP held a portion of the xBase market, as the xBase market shrank so did VFP's.

IMO (and only opinion), I think MS merged with Fox software to acquire three things. 1) the xBase market share that FoxPro had, 2) the technology of the database engine that FoxPro had, and 3) the development team that built it.

One of the major problems that FoxPro had from the beginning was that it completed with VB in the arena of database applications (and it was decidedly better for these apps than VB). Access wasn't in the equation here as it was always designed to be part of the desktop tools and not a development platform (even though it does pretty well as a development tool for certain types of applications).

Another problem that FoxPro had was that it blew the doors in on SQL Server for speed (although SQL Server certainly did and does outclass Fox in many areas of database management).

These two problems created a dilema for MS, how do we market Fox without confusing those customers that are using VB? Does offering a choice between Fox and VB open the door to customers choosing another product from another vendor? IOW, a number of issues that were related to an overall marketing strategy within the developer's products section of MS.

Gate's vision has always been BASIC as the primary language for integration. The millions of developer's using VB only solidified this position. The few hundred thousand developer's using Fox weren't large enough to challenge this strategy within MS.

So now we have a vendor who is in some ways demotivated to market the product, and a shrinking market for the product. Team that up with the "Not invented here" syndrome and the overall shrinking xBase market, the failure of various xBase products in the market, the lack of pressure on Fox from the competition outside of MS, adn you can begin to see a picture emerging.

The fact that VFP is a powerfull development tool and the things that can be done with it will not change. Hell, there are folks still amking a decent living using FoxPro 2.X. If MS decided to kill the fox after version 7.0, in about 1 - 1.5 years. The currency of version 7.0 would probably be another 1.5 - 2 years, giving us 3.5 years and then the life of the product being usable (before it became so obsolete that is would be riduculous to buld systems with it) of about another 3 - 5 years. You get 8+ years of development using VFP as a viable tool.

The point that I and others are trying to make here is that if one does not start expanding their tool set now, they will at some point in time find themselves running as fast as they can to try and catch up with an industry that has passed them by.

The issues of N-Tier design, Web based applications, MTS, DNA, and all of those other technologies is not what we are building today, but rather what will we be building 3 - 5 years down the road. Now is the time to begin exploring the new technologies so that when the demand arrives we will be prepared to meet it.

If one want to work in a industry where they can learn a tool and then go on indefinitely using that tool and never have to learn another, they should consider construction laborer wehre the shovels are the same today as they were 20 years ago. The software industry certainly isn't a static industry.