Hi John,

Your hypothesis is very convincing, except for the fact we're in 1999 now and we're still around ... And they still do development, admittedly not always what we need.

The gap is still very big to pass from Foxpro to more "correct" M$ environments and I wonder if they are really doing their utmost best to close the gap. If the VFP team did not receive explicitly the instruction to close the gap, it is obviously not in their interest to do so.

I think it's Les Pinter who quoted somewhere that it would cost an average developer an investment of 6 months to get the same level of expertise and I do not think that is exagerated, what do you think?

So, are they really after our business? Acces _is_ getting better and a talented user can convincingly develop small applications for a fraction of the price.

Kind regards,

Marc



>The real reason why M$ doesn't push FoxPro and spend those marketing $$ or have Tech-Ed/MSDN sessions around FoxPro is that its not part of their DNA. Its not a profitable for them when you sell user-licenses for SQL Server and charge by the seat. VFP can run the same type of apps but M$ is only getting the $$ from the DEV that bought it, not the 250 seats that are using it to accomplish daily biz. I've felt for along time that M$ bought FoxPro to lure XBase folks to M$ products, eventually weening us of FoxPro to VB/Access or VB/SQL.