Hi John,

>Citing MS's own marketing research people, the xBase market, which VFP is a
member of , is decreasing....

xBase market is not the same as VFP market. And even if the xBase market as a whole decreases, this doesn't mean that the VFP market decreases, as well. It could increase while the other decrease even more, making up a decreasing market as a whole. Have these marketing research people specifically looked at the VFP market? Otherwise, their result would be unusable.

>If it were a growing market, don't you think MS would invest more dollars behind the product?

It's not the growing of a market alone that determines whether Microsoft invests, or not. It's a) future expectations about this market and b) the total of this market. A market might increase by a few 100 percent, if only 1000 people are making up this market, it's not interesting for a low-priced product.

>As for devcons, in 1993, there were something on the order to 2500-2700 attendees at the Fox Devcon. I think 1600 is the best attendence figure in the last couple of years.

And how many other FoxPro DevCons where in 1993, how many there were this year? To compare these numbers, you would have to compare the total number of distinct developers attending any session.

No-one here doubts that the market has decreased between 1993 and 1999, but that's not the point. We are talking about whether the market increases compared to, say, 1998.

>That is why you don't see the quantity of VFP books on the market in relation to other tools such as VB, Java, C, etc....

Really? I can think of a number of other reasons, why there are more books for other languages than for VFP.

Christof