>>If you think that the tech trends favor the ‘best’ products and techs, I’m afraid you are missing most of the picture to say the least.
>>
>>I’ve often tried to prevent VFP devs to invest in Silverlight, Flash and Lightswitch that a basic analysis proved born dead, and wrote over and over, since the early 2000s, and against the general opinion that it was a BS prototype language for non-professionals, that JavaScript would become a predominant language and that’s what happened.
>
>COBOL programmers told me something like that when I switched to Xbase on PC's.
>Several years later when their data centers were shutting down, they reconsidered.
>Of course there are fads and frills and there are good options.
>Knowing the difference is called judgement.

Sorry Bill, you prove nothing and at least you don’t answer my argument or, simply put, you use any argument, even out of the point, just to bring a contradiction. A ‘Nay’ attitude that I thought only existed among us Europeans.

There was a huge difference between COBOL and xBase: xBase gave anyone with a little common sense the ability to build a DB program, while COBOL required a whole infrastructure. xBase opened a brand new market, to fulfill brand new needs.

Silverlight never did, neither does .Net for the desktop as long it does nothing more than previous products already did before: it mainly addresses a renewal/replacement market (rewrite) which has by essense limited growth and revenue