To use a marketing'ism -

Perception IS Reality

Fox is a great tool. VB is a great tool. With numbers come credibilty. Open up any of the rags and look at the case studies on succesfull projects. When was the last time you saw VFP highlighted in InfoWorld, PCWeek, etc? This is the stuff folks read. The Gartner Group is a big source as well. As Cindy accurately pointed out, many managers make decisions based on what the GG reports say or don't say.

There is a critical mass of VFP developer's who keep the tool alive. Right now, it is about maintaining that mass. I don't see new folks using the tool as part of the critical mass. The critical mass is made up of folks who have used the tool for several years. New folks are still on the edge. They can easily dump VFP in favor of something else. Others have an investment in the product and are more likely to stay with it..

However, as time goes on, that critical mass will begin to decay. Changing business requirements will force some to use other tools. Other, will want to gravitate toward other tools. And other's will leave for other reasons...

IMHO, the critical mass is decaying faster than it is being replenished...

Will VFP die? I don't think so. Look at dBase and go to dBase2000.com. Maybe that is a glimpse of the future.

One way or the other, VFP will live. Will it always be a MS product? I don't know. There is already precedent with dBase. Then again, you don't hear alot about dBase, do you? How about clipper/CA-Visual Objects? Those are pretty much dead as well.

The new frontier is the enterprise, the internet, etc... VFP, as perceived by most, is a desktop/lan-based application devlopment tool. Sure, it can play in the web space. It plays in the C/S space. And, it can play in the n-tier space. However, the perception by the folks making the hiring decisions is that it does not.

So, as a consultant, you are left with this decision:

Do I stick to my guns and stick with VFP and not land the big jobs?

Or.

Do I starve?

Tell me this, how many VFP developers would jump at this offer:

We will pay you $100,000 a year to bring your VFP skills to the table to learn VB and to build a full-fledged multi-tier C/S system.

This is where one's loyalty and character are tested. I bet you there are a ton of VFP developers that would jump at a chance like this... They just wont say it up here...

So, will it be a self-fulfilling prophecy? I don't know of any other kind...



>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?