>Would VFP be more widely used if MS had equally divided the advertising budget between VB-Access-SQL-VFP four or five years ago and continued that approach. My guess it that it would.

Allan;

Add "education budget for microsoft sales types". There was a consultant (Access) at my company who had been here for six years. I have been here for just over a year. The consultant proudly announced to me she was responsible for the company not using VFP. All VFP projects were converted to Access.

Guess what? The Access programs do not run well - not for mission critical applications. Down time costs our corporation $10,000 a minute. We have been converting all Access programs to SQL Server 7.0 with Visual Interdev 6.0 for web applications. I am still trying to get them to consider VFP and will not give up.

I have some large VFP applications out there running very smoothly. Dealing with politics and "know it alls" makes life interesting! By the way, the Access consultant is no more. At least not at this company!

Tom