If you are putting blame on Ken, as you seem to be, you are putting it in the wrong place. He is one of the main reasons MS didn't kill VFP sooner.

Your point about developer profitability is surely right, although I doubt billions is the right total. It just didn't figure into the calculus at MS. They were making a diminishing amount of money from a product that didn't figure into their strategic plans. End of story.


>I think it is ironic what you have stated concerning Microsoft not making enough money on VFP - that being a justification for dumping it.
>
>The truth is that billions of dollars have been made off of VFP solutions. The money didn't go to Microsoft, but to companies and individuals that provided the solutions.
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>Microsoft didn't charge enough money :)
>
>
>>I agree with those other competitors you mentioned, and I was just saying the one competitor that FoxPro lost it's only battle to was Microsoft.
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>>VFP competed with SQL Server as a database, and in the free runtime versus user/processor license business model. But I understand your point that it is somewhat apples vs oranges. And, over half of VFP apps in the last 7 years or so use SQL Server rather than DBFs for the app data storage.
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>>>But it's half funny and half sad that the biggest competitor to FoxPro in history was not Borland/Aston-Tate with dBASE, or Borland with Delphi, etc., it was actually Microsoft - with Access, VB, VS/.NET, and SQL Server.
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>>>I have a slightly different perspective. First, Fox had big competition in the early years - competition from Ashton-Tate, QuickSilver, and Clipper. It's just that Fox won the battles by producing a better product (while dBase IV and Clipper 5.0 were horrible failures, and QuickSilver just never evolved).
>>>
>>>I never saw Fox as competition to SQL Server. SQL Server is a database platform. I understand the perspective of the history of MS and Fox and your blog posts, but I think some of the products you mentioned are more of apples-oranges comparisons.