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We need to be sensitive to the fact that companies get burned a lot.
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It's a great point. Out of that fear-of-flame, standards develop. And standards are not necessarily a bad thing -- they have their good points and bad points. (As we've both said, it depends on the situation). On the one hand, especially in large companies, some poor overworked IT manager is trying to balance "using the best tool" with his desire not to have a sort of spaghetti-technology situation. It's easy as a consultant or vendor to walk in and say "use the best tool" (I do it all the time!) without taking into account that time in 1993 when the guy switched half the company to OS/2; or his comments to senior management in 1995 that Windows NT would never *really* make it because its file/server abilities were inferior to Novell's. (And of course, every holiday party, some VP gets tipsy and starts making jokes about predictions like these over near the desert tray).

Now you are asking him to take an IT department running fifteen VB apps of varying sizes, supported by a programming staff of twelve, all of whom they are trying desperately to hold onto in a competitive economy; and introduce an application, or an ongoing project, in an entirely different language. Seen from that point of view, the butterflies are understandable.

So the strategy, as a developer/programmer who works in a maybe-not-so-standard language (VFP), is to seek out companies that already work with VFP; to seek out companies that consider their "standard" language to be "Visual Studio" rather than C++ or VB; to seek out companies that will take risks; or to seek out companies that really don't care what language your product is written in as long as it works. And that, of course, is the strategy for the UI/middle-level -- the database is a whole other issue, and as many have pointed out already, if a company is committed to C/S, it will probably be quite difficult to sway them to a VFP back-end.

Luckily, there are many companies who fit into the categories I list above.