Mike,

I was replying to Evan's comment about having a small VFP app that could be downloaded and run on the user's computer CLR without having to download VFP-specific runtimes to run it.

>Since you won't own the app, the way I see it, MS (if they wanted to, and it won't surprise me if the do) will not give you an option to upgrade Word, since you don't actually own it, they'll force it on you; they can up the hourly charges for using it where ever they want; they will be able to take away features whenever they want, since non of it is on your computer; they will be able to make modifications that make your old work incompatibile with the new version.

This is a horse of a different color. You're talking about the future .NET versions of Microsoft's own applications, which will run somewhere out there in "the cloud", with some kind of lease/rental scheme instead of buying the software.

There's nothing to stop you from continuing to sell your shrink-wrap apps as you do now, with installable VFP runtime, and also turning those apps into Web Services that YOU can lease to your customers.