>>Also, many SQL Saturday and Code Camp events top the VFP Conference in head count. (That's not a judgment, just statement of fact. )

No doubt. VFP has been (at best) damned with faint praise since 1995 and when it refused to fade away by itself (not least because certain people kept releasing updates with meaningful improvements) it got noisily canned. And yet still it has a following and people willing to pay to attend a conference. There's still development going on out there- e.g. you can compile a VFP project into a native app with no runtimes that doesn't need to thunk or can use >2gb local tables or 64bit ODBC drivers if that rocks your boat.

>>Having said that, Microsoft acknowledges that sharing technology skills occurs through many channels...that sometimes, in order to scale up, it needs to be commercialized in order to be cost-justifiable. I've actually had these conversations with them.

LOL. Brave of you to go there. ;-)

>>In Tamar's case, she runs a monthly user group - and as someone who has been a user group leader for four months now, it definitely takes up time.

As a determined cynic, I'm satisfied that Tamar and her SWFox fellows are primarily motivated by a sense of community service. Of course there may be commercial benefits, e.g. maintaining a profile in front of the customer base usually has business benefit, but in fairness Tamar was presenting back in the Compuserve days even before MS got involved when there was no MVP and it actually cost $ to assist others. As you say, it's a big investment of personal time to make these things happen even if somebody is willing to "subsidize" the event/s. Of course even subsidy doesn't always make up for flogging a horse that really is dead, as the whole Winphone experience shows. Which justifies a slight segue into my new phone which is a S7 Edge. Very nice. So I've officially moved from a pure Google device to Samsung. Apple left in the dust- though it might have been smarter to wait for the new Note which rumor says will be even better.