>Hi,
>Did you guys ever think of what would happen to VFP if MS is split. Will the Small MS support a small product like VFP, Will they cease support & eventually kill of VFP ? It scares the **** out of me. Will I have a job if this goes ahead ?

We will gain nothing if MS gets split up! I guess it would be very interesting to know how it would get split up. Would they split divisions of the company? One MS that has Windows, one that has developer tools, one that has games,...? That wouldn't seem to make a lot of sense as far as their current issue goes (but then again: how much sense does this lawsuit make anyway?).

The other option would be to split up the Windows division. How that would work, I don't know. I guess we would have Windows and COM+ as seperate services. Or Windows and IE as seperate services. That would suck! Basically all my apps would stop working since I need services that belong to IE (even though IE itself never shows up).

Either way, I can not see how any user or developer would benefit from that situation. I remember times when OS/2 was popular in Europe. We lost a ton of sales over the fact that our systems didn't work on OS/2. But as a small software house, we couldn't afford to develop for to OSes.

Which of course raises a different question: Where are competing Operatins Systems going to come from? Splitting up MS isn't going to create new operating systems. Developers will, but as Linux has demonstrated, this is done already. Sure, it is going to be a huge financial hurdle to develop as system as large as Windows. But whether MS is in the game or not, this won't change. The only thing that might get that cost down is a lower level of quality. I'm sure everybody would benefit from that change... ;-)


But to get back to your original question: Will FoxPro die because of this? Well, this will also depend on how MS would get split up. If the departments stay together, and Visual Studio stays intact as a product, nothing would be any different than now. If Visual Studio got broken up, things might be different. We could have two development suites: One with VB and SQL Server and another one with C++ and VFP (or any other combination). That would bring up a competitive situation with either party pushing their tool, essentially providing much more visibility for VFP. So either way: VFPs situation is strong.

Markus