>We've converted several VFP apps to .NET quite successfully.
>We didn't do it "just to do so."
>The VFP apps needed some heavy expansions. We discussed doing the expansions in VFP vs .NET with the clients. The consensus was the .NET made more sense and as things turned out, that was a good call.
>The clients are still running several VFP apps and probably will run them that way ad infinitum..

Bill,

Converting and expanding are quite different, don't you think?

You may refer to a custom app. with many additional specs requiring 50-60% code alterations

Tuvia's point, which is also my point and FiC,'s point, is about applications that have been around for a while, been mainly developed in the 90's, continuously improved since, and have gained quite a large user base (500 and more) - aka 'off the shelf' software ('progiciel' in French ;).

Let's say mature apps or S/W, that is the source of revenue for a given company (ISV)

For this kind of software, many respected authors view a complete rewrite as an inevitable 'strategic disaster' e.g. Mr Joel Spolsky, former dev head at ms : http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html


Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long time in the Internet world. During this time, Netscape sat by, helplessly, as their market share plummeted.

It's a bit smarmy of me to criticize them for waiting so long between releases. They didn't do it on purpose, now, did they?

Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:

They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.

Netscape wasn't the first company to make this mistake. Borland made the same mistake when they bought Arago and tried to make it into dBase for Windows, a doomed project that took so long that Microsoft Access ate their lunch, then they made it again in rewriting Quattro Pro from scratch and astonishing people with how few features it had. Microsoft almost made the same mistake, trying to rewrite Word for Windows from scratch in a doomed project called Pyramid which was shut down, thrown away, and swept under the rug. Lucky for Microsoft, they had never stopped working on the old code base, so they had something to ship, making it merely a financial disaster, not a strategic one.