>>I just hated the way that PK ruined
>
>Who is PK?

Phillipe Kahn, of Borland fame. Seems to me that he was trying to purchase his way to desktop application dominance rather than sticking to his best strength, making development tools like Borland C and Turbo Pascal. dBase, along with VFP has always been something in the middle between low level languages like C, Pascal, C++, ASM, etc and higher level products like spreadsheets, word processors, etc.

He paid over twice what Gates paid for FoxPro, got few if any of the developers unlike Microsoft who got them ALL to move with the exception of one who stayed in Toledo for family reasons, and promptly managed one ot THE biggest product introduction fiascos in history with the release of dBase IV. What a horrible thing to do to a good product.

His "schtick" was to be known as Phillipe the Barbarian, playing his saxaphone and being a hardy party animal. Works fine when you're dealing with developers but for the head of a corporation to act that way will only cause those in the boardroom and their immediate subordinates to avoid being associated with your company and its products. Can you imagine some CIO of a large bank wanting to introduce his CEO to someone like Phillipe who had such a reputation? Not me.

The dBase language has always suffered from a kind of reputation where it's not perceived as a "real" programming language. I don't agree with that assessment whatsoever but I'm not the middle manager who makes purchasing and technical direction decisions based on a certain perception. I can't tell you how many times this has happened where some high powered group like the Gartner Group has kind of pooh-poohed a product like FoxPro when it was arguably the best product to get the specific job done.

These new folks (Katz et all) need to not only focus on their image with the developers to get into shops through the back door, IMO that also need to pay attention the the front door as it were and actively and aggressively solicit the people who will make the real money purchasing decisions that will breathe life into dBase again. Without that IMO they are history.

They also need to malke dBase the premire product technically and that costs LOTS of money. Where does that money come from? Borland, now Inprise basically just gave the product away from what I understand. Why? Too much money spent supporting a product with shrinking revenues.

We are VERY FORTUNATE to have found a home at Microsoft.

Who is left standing? FoxPro.

That's all that counts.

Best,