Michel,

If DEVCON participants, or anyone else, judge VFPs future by the number of ads and the amount of publicity generated, then I think this is truly a sad situation!

Yes, marketing counts for something. BUT it is *NOT* the WHOLE thing!!!

Yes, it is important for MS big-wigs to "push" VFP, and there is some indication that this is happening. Possibly as important as any of these things, though, is the content/quality of the Help and DOCUMENTATION in general.
VFP needs a LOT of work in the HELP, both for its content (completeness) and referencability (new word of the day!). This *INCLUDES* telling us in the Help what the "design" specifications are, not writing some sparse technical memo resolving a problem by there announcing that it is "working as designed"!

It also needs to get it working correctly. Yes, a complex product will have problems, but to date we have had far too many of the BASIC variety (often aided and abetted by poor documentation).

Good advertising will surely help an above-average product, but it is debateable that it can "save" a poor to mediocre product. Right now VFP has a more mediocre than "fine" rating overall in my books. Great potential which cannot be realized by advertising.

My 2¢ worth
Jim N

>>In the 15aug97 issue of Computer Contractor (VNU Business Publication), a magazine targeted at contractors in IT industry in the UK, I came across an article "The Need For Speed", which attempted to address the speed issues in client/server enviromnents.
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>>Unfortunately the author attempted to make comparisons qualitatively using VFP (and xbase) mainly to illustrate a file-base system and a client/server based system.
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>>Terms like "The toy databass like Visual Foxpro and the Xbases are file-server based. Ture industrial-strength systems, on the other hand ..."
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>>In making its point about file-based databases, it mentioned "to find one match out of 100k orders, all 100k of them have to passed over the network from the server to the client (workstation)".
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>>The above is just an example of how non-Foxpropeople misunderstand Foxpro in particular, and the suitability rule (as in horses for courses) in general.
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>>Another issue: In an client's Oracle backend environment that I am working in at the moment, we needed to extract reports from a longchar field. I voluntered VFP has a quick and easy way to extract the reports, but the others prefer Access. Why? "Because if you are not here, nobody else knows VFP" came the reply! Sadly, I think to an extent, the client is right! At other customer sites, they usually say "Foxpro who?"
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>>The reason of the lack of publicity at MS is very clear. When you sell SQL Server, you get paid on a per client, or per seat basis. The more installations you have, the more money MS receives. Now, in the case of the developer's version of VFP, the developers buys a copy, and that is all MS is going to receive, regardless of the number of copies of applications the developer sells in the product's version-lifetime.
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>>You can argue about boosting the image of MS, profiling Win95 etc etc, but at the end of the day, it is the monies flowing into MS's corporate coffers that counts (to MS, I mean).
>
>This is an interesting message. You might have some good points about the per license and the fact that in some region companies are afraid to go with VFP because they have trouble to find another VFP to come to the rescue in case the main resource is no longer available.
>
>But, it's not as bad as it was possible. The recent increase of marketing from Microsoft about VFP has helped a lot. I think we can still expect more from MS and it would be interesting to see the point of view at DevCon after this recent increase of marketing.