From a fellow traveller's perspective your blog post is dead-on.

Scattered thoughts: I remember that your Ballmer video was a huge surprise because most of us thought no one at that level gave a crap. It was a monster win for you.

The VFP 9 green light was a surprise but I recall we went into that thinking that if we could remove existing limits and add features that would keep our developers happy for years to come we would get approved.

Within our own division few even knew we existed. When that 10th anniversary plane flew around with the banner above the building no one commented on it....it was a serious bummer.

Thinking back, I think by 2005 VFP had only 4 true believers left at MS: You, me, Calvin, and Randy. No shame in fighting the good fight for our customers and friends.


>I'd also be curious to read questions and comments about this blog post. There were executive videos for VFP 7.0 and VFP 8.0, which helped perception at the time. I wrote over 90% of the text read in both those speeches, and are a bit ironic to reference now. http://cicorp.com/Foxpro/future.htm. For some reason the Ballmer WMV video download link doesn't work. I have the video, but it wouldn't be right for me to post it online, and it might be online somewhere else. But the transcript text is there, although it's not the same as hearing the audio of him saying at the end... "as we build a bigger, and better, and a more successful FoxPro developer community."
>
>That video Steve Ballmer recorded, it was recorded in late October 2001. But it was originally scheduled to be recorded at 10:00am Pacific Time on September 11, 2001. I was suppose to then get the WMV file later that afternoon to show to FoxPro developer attendees at the Advisor VFP DevCon during the evening event at SeaWorld at the Orca/Shamu show in San Diego - all of which ended up being canceled obviously. This was never known at the time, because the video was not announced in advance.
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>>http://mashupx.com/blog/2010/12/09/visual-foxpro-strategy-at-microsoft/
>>
>>I have no comment. And you?
>>Read carefully please!