>>I know that the idea of M$ having customers somehow doesn't fit with their invention of evangelist as a salesperson - pushing a dogma instead of catering to your customers' needs somehow doesn't fit with my preconceptions of market economy. Maybe I'm prejudiced and M$ really is a religion, do as your priests say and don't ask any questions. Well, then, in that case I remain a heathen.
>
>A heathen and a commie, don't forget ;-) (If anyone doesn't know I'm joking, I am).

Just to be noted, IMO the communists you know of were doing it wrong. To start with, they didn't apply their theory to themselves. But then, neither do the capitalists - the free market being anything but, as exemplified with the case at hand. M$ has built a de facto monopoly, and always had the money to prove (or buy the proof) that was not de iure the case. And it's getting beaten, but not by free market, but rather by another wannabe monopolist - Apple.

>To me the decision was always just business. They didn't hate FoxPro and in fact kept it alive for about 15 years. I doubt Fox Software could have managed a Windows version that looked just as polished as any other Windows development tool. As another luminary, Ken Levy, said, the sales and the revenue just weren't there. If anything they kept it going longer than they should have. I have absolutely no quarrel with MS's stewardship of FoxPro.

I am a very dissatisfied customer. M$ bought Fox for all the wrong reasons - to get hold of Rushmore, to have a horse in its stable to parry Borland's Dbase IV, and (the reason it kept developing it) to get hold of half a million programmers who'd be buying their tools on and on. While some of these had loyalty to the owner of the product, many (including me) are loyal only to the product itself, the gruntlement (now a word!) being proportional to the treatment of the product by its owner.