>Point well taken. I would counter by asking if PB continues to advance their product, to invent new technology, to set standards. I suggest MS, in many ways, is setting standards, advancing technology while PB has not made many advances since their major upgrade 3 yeares ago (PB 6?). Another place where VFP beats them is support for both remote data and local tables and views with the ability to transparently [to the user] switch between the types.

This may be true (I don't follow PB very carefully). I think it has more to do with Sybase's resources and priorities than anything else.

>To further elaborate on your point, the ODBC drivers provided by MS work better, with respect to MS front-ends, on Oracle back-ends than the drivers provided by Oracle. I can not speak for the Oracle front-end development products. I assume the Oracle drivers work fine with their own tools. So, I think you need to keep like products together on the client side.

Keep in mind that ODBC itself is an MS technology. I think that lot's of non-MS tools use native Oracle drivers rather than ODBC.

>I also think it behooves MS competitors to figure out how to best compete with MS before it is too late. For example, our standard word processing software is WordPerfect, but we are slowly moving to Word [and the Office suite] because of the ease of integration with each other and VFP. If WP had been smart over the last 2 or 3 years, they would have made advances toward making their product more OLE friendly.

This is definitely true. Companies don't want to make their products too compatible with MS technologies because they don't want to help MS. On the other hand, MS is the standard and if you don't support standards and can't make your own, you're toast. Of course, MS has the advantage of owning the standards. If they're trying to enhance a product and run into a bug in OLE, they can just fix it. They also have advance knowledge of where these standards are going.