>>>As for Ken, he has given far more to this community than he has ever tried to take.. IMO that's a pretty crucial difference.
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>>I second this motion.
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>The first time I met Ken was at an event at Microsoft while VFP 3 was in development, an event that was unfortunately dubbed the Guru Summit. (I was not there on merit. At the time I was doing a lot of work with Foxtalk magazine and the editor, Bob Grommes, asked me to go in his place because his brother was getting married that weekend). Ken was in his longhair phase, working for Flash I think. You couldn't help noticing that the VFP team members talked to him like he was one of them.
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>I was smart enough to know I was lucky to be there and took it all in like a sponge. The product wasn't even called Visual FoxPro yet. That was the first time all but a handful of people outside Microsoft had seen it. And boy, did MS rob the community blind. Among the attendees who were then independent or working for other companies and subsequently went to work for Microsoft were Ken, YAG, Randy Brown, Calvin Hsia, George Goley, Melissa Dunn, Allison Koeneke, and probably some others I am forgetting. Not a bad haul in three days.
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>Bob Grommes wanted a full report from me, which of course I gave him. The main thing I told him is we need to look at a new group of experts. It was immediately clear that there were some legacy gurus ((c) Whil Hentzen) who were no longer going to be the experts, who did not grok VFP, and another group who would be on the rise. Ken was the star of all of them.

I remember George and Melissa going to MSFT in 1995 or 1996 right after the Scottsdale, AZ conference I attended...