>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.

I'm not too sure about this figures, How could one possible measure these figures. I've got two colleages who still write applications with Clipper summer '87. How do you count these developers. I'll bet that in many 3rd world countries there are many Clipper, DBase and FPD programmers arround. One of my clients which works for the world health organization and has lived in india for many years and visits afrika quite often did tell me that neither VB or Access is used very much in these countries. Most apps where developed with xBase languages. I wonder how one could count these developers and applications.

>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.

Well if i look at the dutch market I don't see an overwhelming demand of VB developers. It could be that i'm wrong, but I think that the US market is somewhat different than ours. As I said before the world is bigger than the US only, and counting xBase developers worldwide is a very difficult job.

>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.

I never had any illision that it would. VB has a far bigger marketplace than VFP. Let's face it VFP is in a kind of nich market. But IMO, in this nich market it's doing faily well.

>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.

I agree. IMO this is already the case. I've seen many cases where VFP was applied where both powerbuilder and Oracle 2000 could have been applied.

Walter,