>>>>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.
>>>
>>>IMO those were all valid business reasons. Cold maybe, but just business. No company is in business to be our eternal pals.
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>>Yet the same company expected us to remain their customers and keep buying programming tools from them.
>
>Can we really complain about the longevity of Fox?
>I started using it in 1986 and still use it.
>I have some clients that will use it till it some event occurs that makes in not usable.
>If that's not long enough, what is a reasonable expectation of longevity?

Hey, I know a few guys around here who still sell apps written in FPD2.6, and they make a living.

It's that M$ wanted to sink Fox after version 5, but couldn't afford to lose (half of a) half a million programmers. So the longevity of Fox is not entirely merit of M$, it's more due to community stubbornness.