Hi Walter,

When you talk about ten years ago (1989), let me give you some insight. 10 years ago there were literally millions of Fox and Clipper developers, not to mention the dBASE III/IV crowd. Now, all estimates point to 500,000 to 600,000 active Fox developers.

IMHO, of those 600,000, probably half are VFP developers and the other half still developing/maintaining 2.x apps. Of the former half, maybe 2/3, or 200,000 are using VFP as an OOP tool and not just a new-fangled version of 2.x. And of those, maybe 10-20% (20,000-40,000) are fully competent in distributed architecture with VFP.

I think Ed pointed out that VFP marketshare may be increasing arithmatically, but VB opportunities increase almost geometrically. I am in the camp that VFP development is increasing, but not proportionate to systems development as a whole.

So what does this mean? IMHO, it means that we VFP developers don't have anything to worry about for now and that the tool and opportunities to use it aren't going anywhere. But I don't think we can kid ourselves that VFP is suddenly going to leap up and snatch the lead from VB.

Now, here's another opinion or concept: If MS thought long and hard about it, they might realize that VFP, if beefed up a bit, makes the perfect competitor to PowerBuilder and some Oracle UI tools.