George,

>>Shades of Larry Ellison:
>>
>>I was working for a company that sold an application written in Visual FoxPro to Oracle. Yes, Oracle was the back end! Some custom code was required so my company sent me over to Building 8, at Redwood Shores. The office I was brought to was not very big but soon there were 14 Oracle developers standing behind me. I had VFP loaded on my notebook and began writing the code. After a moment one of the developers said: “I can read the code – it's a 4GL”! I said, yes, and suggested they purchase a copy of VFP, so they would not have to pay my company $150 an hour. I was told: “Larry Ellison will not allow any Microsoft tools on the premises”! Each time a new requirement came up I was sent over to do the coding. Our office was about three miles away.
>>
>>Later that day I called a friend and told him this story and my friend said: “Don’t they know that there is a major VFP project going on in building 5”? Typical of large corporations – the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.
>>
>Tom,
>
>Sounds right. Larry doesn't believe in paying for "bits in a box", let alone paying Microsoft for them.:-)
>
>JIC anyone missed Jim's reference, the "Oracle of Omaha" he was referring to is Warren Buffet, the man behind Berkshire-Hathaway (which owns, among others things, Geico Insurance, Shaw, and major holdings in Coca-Cola and Gillette).


Buffet owns Shaw outright? Yipes! man, I'd sure like to have one or two shares of his stock. <g>