Hi Jeff,

You're such a naughty boy, but I know that you're really with us. There's nothing about what we're after that wouldn't please Wall Street, and I can assure you that they have plenty of respect for the relationship between customer satisfaction and profits. All we have to do is explain to Microsoft why they should believe that VFP will make them still more money. MS may come to this realization on their own, if we make the case so abundantly clear that the conclusion is inescapable. The VFP community has more than enough tools and talent at its disposal to accomplish this.

I have no doubt that this will eventually come to light in the media, and I suspect that Microsoft's spin doctors have already begun thinking about how they're going to manage this. I've been going out of my way to avoid being overly-critical of MS, so they can have as much room as possible to creatively come up with a way of putting a positive spin on it. Microsoft can end this only one way: by immediately taking the corrective action of demonstrably promoting VFP, and sustaining an appropriate level of VFP marketing from that point on. There won't be any need to count on further promises, because the actions we're waiting for are, by definition, visible. In the meantime, the list will grow. When the dust clears, the press will have a field day one way or another, because what's going on here is much bigger the VFP and Microsoft.

Mike

>>Maybe you have no legal rights, but a company whose business model doesn't focus on pleasing the customer is not running a healthy operation, and it will cost them in the end. How does Microsoft factor in things like resentment, lack of credibility, and disgust?
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>Don't be fooled. MS business model is based on pleasing Wall Street. And, once again, in order to do that, they have to constantly develop and market new technologies. This is not to say that some sort of critical mass won't be reached when their technologies are years ahead of being implimented anywhere and their revenue will take a nose dive - I predicted this a long time ago here.
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>But what you are suggesting (i.e. the OpenLetter) will have little impact unless the situation is brought to light with the media in a profound way. Then again, I really don't think Wall Street analysts would give a damn - just look at what they did with the dot-coms (driving up P/Es until they imploded) ought to tell you something.
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>However, keep up the good spirit. Maybe it will rekindle the optimism in pessimists like me.