>Bill is correct in noting that your analogies have some flaws. Take for example the 8 track tape. It was the consumer market place that dictated its failure, not an executive decision at the manufacturer that 1/4" (I think) should replace those gawd awful devices that gobbled tape for breakfast lunch and dinner. Compared to newer technology 8 track couldn't complete. In the case of VFP, it still compares well against the competition but it was an executive decision at MS that killed it, not the natural forces of competition in the market place.

Really?? You sure?? How can you tell me that the executive decision was not made based on discussions with customers, who said they were moving away from it? Yes, VFP was/is superior in many ways to VB 6, which seemed to be the darling of developer tools at the time. But Betamax was also superior to VHS. And as I recall, there were two competing technologies for DVDs and the inferior one won the battle there too. And it wasn't based on consumer choice. The movie studios pushed the winner.

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>Likewise for VHS, DVD, and Blueray. Better technology came along and the older technologies could not complete. Again not the situation that prevails with VFP. Also, VHS tapes are not useless, you can play them on a tape player and if ambitious enough convert them to either digital or a newer media - that's what I'm doing.

That's not necesarily true. It depends on your needs. Do you need to do web services? JSON? Forget VFP. Do you need a mobile app? Forget VFP. High-level graphics? Yes, there are some wrappers for GDI+, but you're not really using VFP to do it. I can give more scenarios to you.

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>The technology shifts you describe come from the marketplace, they were not dictated from on-high and they offered advantages to the final consumer. The ultimate elimination of VFP was not a reaction to the marketplace, it was an attempt at picking winners and losers by MS decision makers and understandably has not been well received by the developer community.

Again, are you sure? Cloud computing is all the rage right now, but is it consumers who are really pushing it or tech companies that want the drive revenue based on usage?

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>There is no good rationale for what MS did with VFP To many of us that's obvious and trying to defend their actions is futile. Its better to simply admit MS screwed up, the situation is as it is today, now what direction do you want to go in. What MS did removes loyalty from the equation and makes community driven tools, like Java or Python, so much more attractive.

There is no good rationale from your view point. There is very good rationale from the MS viewpoint. And again, that's all that matters because they're not driven by "pleasing customers". They're driven by "increasing shareholder value". If in THEIR VIEW POINT, that's best done by promoting one product/tech over another, then that's what they do.

And Microsoft knew their decision to kill Fox would drive some people to competing products. (BTW, Java is not community driven. Have you talked to any Java devs about what's happened since Oracle took ownership?)

I'm not saying Microsoft was right in what they did. What I'm saying is I'm really getting tired of this topic when people refuse to view by any points other than their own. I see both sides. I did Fox development for many years and I hated to see it go. I was not happy with the decision, but I also looked at from their viewpoint. I'm not happy with decisions Microsoft has made in other areas either.

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>I think this dead horse is pretty much whipped in to something beyond death. Time to go work on some 25+ year old code and fiddle with some prototypes for smartphones.

Agreed. Let's all get to work and quit complaining about this.