>I really don't think it's accurate to say Microsoft "killed" VFP. Technically true, eventually, but misleading to put it that way. It was, what, about 15 years after the acquisition that they pulled the plug? They made it into a first class Windows developer tool. We all snicker at VFP 3 now but it was in fact a monumental advance in the language, something I doubt a little company in a Toledo strip mall could have pulled off. And they kept advancing the product right until the end. When I encounter the typical corporate attitude that FoxPro is something from the Roosevelt era -- Teddy -- I no longer say anything, but I know right there they know nothing about the product.

Yes, MS supported vfp longer than most of us feared when we heard of the merger in the early nineties.
But the bolded part above is what killed vfp: getting a system from outside and rearranging
it to live inside COM-windows and nowhere else.

Vfp would not have become as easily accepted as in the mid and late nineties without the MS tag added,
but would have been kept in a form better suited for moving to other OS. The question is,
would a non-MS vfp have survived that much better than dBase, Clipper, dBMan, Quicksilver and others.

And vfp3 was also almost unusable on the HW/OS combinations available back then:
I stayed with 2.6 a long time, having built some small systems in vfp5
(lured in by the better debugger) and switched over with vfp6, esp. as SP3 made it solid.

My best guess is a non-bought up fox would have added some kind of DD and COM first,
and then in the mid nineties would also have grown OOP muscles.

my 0.0001 €

thomas