Do not say, "never", because they did market it. They didn't do much, but it WAS done.

Who did you talk to that said, "use another product?" What was their job? Was their compensation based on sales of products? Did they have sales quotas to meet? I'm not saying what they did was right, but they may have had their own compensation as their biggest interest. There are lots of things at play that could have caused that response.

Microsoft is a HUGE company and many people obviously were not aware of all their products. It's impossible to know about all of them. When I was at 3M, people inside the company frequently said to me, "3M sells software?" It happens in big companies. I'm not saying it's right, nor am I defending Microsoft. I'm telling you that it's the way things are.

>In my mind that's not what really happened. Microsoft bought Fox, but never marketed it, and when you asked more or less any Microsoft employee about Fox, they usually tried to convice you to use another product, like Access or SQL server. When I many years ago contacted Microsoft Norway and asked them about Visual Foxpro, I was told that they could not help me because Visual Foxpro was not a Microsoft product. So Microsoft slowly but knowingly killed Fox, since other products earned them more money.