Folks,

I generally try to ignore all of the 'Fox is Dead' threads that come up, but the simple fact that they come up again and again is quite disturbing. A lot of people seem to think that Fox is gone already, and I have been contending with the results for at least two years.

There is a famous story that LBJ wanted one of his campaign managers to accuse his component of being a pig-F*****. The manager objected, 'I can't call him that!!' To which LBJ replied, 'I don't care, just make him deny it!' It seems to me that we in the Fox Community do a lot of denying. It's not dead! we object again and again. It is very discouraging to have to keep insisting on this point.

Before 1997, no client or decision maker I dealt with ever cared what tool I used. Never. Since about mid-1997 or so they have all somehow acquired the impression that Fox is obsolete and doomed. Since many of these decision makers are not technical people, their opinions are all the more devastating; they will do what they think is safe, and they all fall back on the same tired responses: 'Sure, Ken, Fox is better, but so was Betamax.'

I met the CTO of a large corporation whose very first sentence to me was that he was not 'technical' (coming from a CTO, that sounded like, 'Hi, I'm not qualified for my job'). He then told me all of his reasons for preferring Visual Basic over anything. To a programmer, they were all foolish and naive. But what does it matter? He has the power and he will make the decisions.

I'm just curious about what people think: Most of us know that Fox is one of the best overall products ever to exist, even granting its weaknesses in some areas, but do you really think we can survive the continuous onslaught of misinformation and trends?