Unfortunately, this story will likely become one of the more common legacies of Visual Foxpro. To put this posting into a bit of context: I'm an MD with a compsci background. I've written a few hundred thousand lines of C and assembly code along the way... enough to grant myself momentary license to share my perspectives from a techno-political viewpoint within the healthcare industry. I have seen firsthand that the healthcare industry is full of fabulous opportunities (and dire need) to put to good use a data management and analysis tool like VFP. I've tried to share this perspective with many "decision makers".

What I found: It doesn't matter if you show the opportunity.

I have seen applications written in VFP that crunch through millions of records in seconds and empower users with discoveries and results that could (in my guestimate) only be equaled by using development enviroments in which it would take 5 times as long and cost several times as much to create a similar application, and it would be an application much less flexible at that.

What I found: It doesn't matter if you prove the prowess of the technology.

I have shown VFP applications to CIO's and IS managment at several hospitals and managed care organizations around the country... applications that solved problems that heretofor were deemed either unsolvable, too expensive to solve, or both.

What I found: It doesn't matter if you prove that you have a working solution in hand, even if it's the only solution. Sometimes I even get the feeling that there is a real stigma... i.e., if it's done in Foxpro, it _can't_ be any good, even if it does work and the same problem has remained unsolved with other in-house tools.

The best way to get instant acceptance: Hide the VFP origin, lie, and tell'em it's a VB client-server app. Then they love it and want to buy it right away.

In fact, what I've found sadly corroborates the story by Francois. Most people who use VFP love it for its powerful data-centric capabilities and very rapid development environment. However, it has virtually no credibility within the decision-making levels of healthcare IS for several reasons, most of them (as I see it) born out of politics, superficial perspectives, and technological ignorance that, when combined, ultimately lead to a form of bureaucratic discrimination. And to a large degree, I do hold Microsoft accountable for this outcome, much like Francois does. In fact, I would switch to another tool in a moment if only it were as nimble and flexible as VFP for _both_ app development and data management+analysis.

Just my $0.02.