A couple of weeks ago, I started a poll of the Visual FoxPro community to determine the extent of support for sending an open letter to Microsoft encouraging them to do a better job of marketing and promoting VFP. (If you haven't yet seen http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~WillMicrosoftMarketVFP, please take a moment to review it and cast your own vote.) As we now approach a count of 400 voters, with more than 99% voting in favor of the idea, I want to address what I think should happen next.

There can hardly be any question of a widespread consensus, both openly stated and less openly, but no less strongly shared by an overwhelming majority of the VFP community that MS is not doing enough to market and promote VFP, that we want this to change, and that it would also be in Microsoft's best interest do this. Many of us, myself included, have questioned whether an "open letter" to MS will merely be another ineffectual repetition of the same tired message we've muttered year after year. Now it's time to take stock of the situation and consider how we can make sure that this effort turns into more than a token gesture.

Understand that the real objective of this poll was not to prove to ourselves that we support this idea, nor was the objective to produce a letter to Microsoft. The objective was and is to achieve a swift, significant, and lasting improvement in the promotion of Visual FoxPro to an audience beyond the VFP community itself. The letter to MS is a means to that ultimate end, and this poll is the means to creating an effective letter. Whatever the medium, whatever the message, whomever the audience, the impact of our collective voice will be directly proportional to the number of us who speak in unison.

There will be plenty of administrative and creative work ahead of us, and this will not be easy, but it will be worth our while and we'll have the resources to meet these challenges if we have enough supporters. What is enough? I don't know exactly, but I'd say it should be something much closer to the actual size of the entire VFP community, i.e. a number that is orders of magnitude larger that what we've attained so far. Is this achievable? Sure it is! Look at the http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~WillMicrosoftMarketVFPAnnouncements page and ask yourself, "Have we even tried to spread this message out to the whole VFP community?" If we had, you would see evidence of announcements to all of the major regional VFP user groups. If you know of an announcement that was posted but not recorded in this page, please add an entry for it. If you are active in a regional forum that has never displayed such an announcement, please make the posting yourself, and add a corresponding entry in list. If you are multi-lingual, see if you can translate an announcement into a language that hasn't yet been covered, and put the text of your translated message into the list. We won't reach everyone with these forum postings, but we'll reach enough people in enough places to start a process that could percolate down to the grass roots across the whole world within a matter of weeks. If you want this campaign to be successful, there's nothing more important, nothing easier, and nothing that will yield a greater return on the energy expended than making this small, concerted effort to spread the word as quickly and efficiently as possible.

We owe it to ourselves to establish a voice that is truly representative of the of the entire united VFP community. In voting to consider an open letter, we are also registering our right to participate in any and all future actions we may collectively take to promote Visual FoxPro. Why should we forget what united us in the first place, and what we labored so hard to assemble? Microsoft certainly knows the names of its own customers, but now we need to know each other too, so we can begin to more effectively represent ourselves.

Thanks and best wishes to all,

Mike Asherman