>>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.
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>Are you kidding?

Yes, for the most part, I was kidding. However, I have been in software presentations (i.e., demo sessions) where that ploy was used just enough to test the hypothesis, and the hypothesis seemed to hold some merit.

The industry situation with VFP kind of reminds me of racism: Two guys apply for a job. One guy has outstanding qualifications (and is black). The other is only mediocre (but is white). On paper, the winner is obvious. But when the in-person interviews happen and skin color is revealed, guess who gets the job?

Even though it can beat any other horse around the track in the contest to provide particular kinds of data centric software solutions, VFP is a dark horse in the industry. As a race horse, MSFT never really let it out of the starting gate. Why? I personally think MSFT has been concerned all along that stongly promoting VFP would erode or delay migration to its much more expensive (and profitable) tools like SQL Server and other BackOffice components. With VFP, you can permanently solve some pretty big data management problems for a tiny fraction of the cost of using SQL server and its associated tools.