Hi All!

In response to the letters that went out last week from IT Factory to some of us, Brian Kiser of the ProFox list wrote to David Luter of IT Factory with his concerns.

Here is David's response, which Brian posted to ProFox and encouraged me to post here.

---

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Luter [SMTP:dluter@sbd.com]
> Sent: Monday, September 11, 2000 11:27 AM
> To: BrianE.Kiser@...
> Subject: Re: FoxPro
>
> Brian,
>
> Thanks very much for the feedback. I can assure you we were not trying to
> bash FoxPro in any way. I can also assure you that your e-mail was not
> the first accusing us of bashing.
>
> The fact is we got a list that was very hard to identify [and filter] roles
> for the purpose of our target audience. We didn't mean this letter to
> address developers per se. One gentleman even accused us of trying to put
> "hard working FoxPro developers out of business". I think we missed the
> mark and were mildly misunderstood. Lesson learned!! The largest part of
> our company [about 300 total] are Lotus Notes developers. I can imagine
> what their reaction would be if someone even implied that Lotus Script
> [roughly similar to VB] were anything but perfect. I'd have to wear a
> flack jacket to work!!! They are a pretty loyal group. Even having a
> Microsoft practice in the largest independent Lotus development
> organization in the world [beside IBM/Lotus] gives me chills at times.
> Nuf said!!!
>
> We were trying to appeal to "companies" who were running older FoxPro
> applications [many of which are running on a Novell network]. They often
> are very valuable [even critical] to the organization but are just
> impossible to support anymore. There are probably very few of these [on
> the grand scale of things in this world] but we wanted to let people know
> there is someone who does this as a service. I even ran the letter through the
> Microsoft FoxPro "guru" here in the Microsoft Mid Atlantic/DC region for
> feedback before sending it. Plus we had to get approval for the letter
> from the list owner, too.
>
> We truly didn't intend the letter to be mean-spirited. We've done this
> type of work for large organizations [up to $18B
> per year in revenues]; and small organizations [trade associations with
> annual revenues down to $350,000]; and medium sized organizations
> [currently a $90M financial services company].
>
> Thanks for taking the time to share your opinion.
>
> David Luter, MCSS

---