Hi John,

>Look, MS's own marketing folks have attested to the fact that the xBase market, which like it or not, includes VFP, is descreasing.

I think that the market for VFP (or other MS products for that matter) goes beyond traditional concepts of what determines a market in the first place.

As a professional analyst (in addition to having some programming skills), I can tell you that any comprehensive market analysis of a product like VFP is extremely difficult to perform due to it's multi-faceted nature.

In general, from what I have seen from MS marketing is an overall lack of quantitative objectivity. This has nothing to do with VFP per se. Iv'e seen this in focus groups I have attended, the way they construct questionaires, verbal surveys, etc. They have a knack of designing these things to support pre-determined hypothesis. Then they can make a claim that they based their results on what the customer wanted. Case-in-point: the MVPs.

This trick dates back centuries and has it's roots in politics. It is general used as a concensus building mechanism with no real regard for the people (customers in this case). As such, this is not what modern day marketing is all about.