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>Well Robert's job is somewhat a mystery to many of us. He was last titled something along the lines of 'Product Development Manager for VS' and prior as directly related to VB in some capacity.
>He does not seem to be a MEMBER of the VFP Team and seems not to have been one for some time. I acknowledge that he shows up at DevCon and such but guess that it is simply because the VFP community "knows" him and his passion for VFP and MS lets him appear for its own reasons.

Robert is very much a member of the Fox team. He also has responsiblities for other areas too. So, he isn't a devoted resource. I'm not sure what percentage of his time is devoted to VFP.

>
>MICROSOFT MARKETING. MICROSOFT MARKETING. MICROSOFT MARKETING.

>MICROSOFT TRAINING. MICROSOFT TRAINING. MICROSOFT TRAINING.
Are you talking internal or external?

>MICROSOFT INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS. MICROSOFT INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS.
Internal communications is very difficult in an organization as large as MS. I will state again (and this is something I said previously in this thread) that at MS Corporate (ie Redmond) VFP is well known and in fact is used by many of the teams. Going out to the field is a different story. The field sales engineers get literally hundreds of emails per day. It's very difficult to get the message out when only a percentage of those emails are being read.

> - anyone in MS excluding the VFP Team. And if you come back with something along the lines that it is each team's responsibility to 'market' their own product then the VFP TEam obviously needs to hire a competent marketer.

Obviously each team is responsible, but there is most likely some cross-polination of somekind. As for competency, Robert wouldn't be in his position if he wasn't compentent. I've talked to Robert about VFP marketing on several occassion, the last being just a couple of weeks ago. The issue is dollars. There just aren't enough dollars allocated to do the job that most VFP developers want.

>
>*IF* (repeat: IF) it truly is still Mr. Green's job to market VFP then let me state categorically that he, possibly guided by the GURU collection deemed (erroneously) to speak for the community, has FAILED MISERABLY AT THE TASK.
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>He has heard these complaints for at least 5 years now and NOTHING HAS CHANGED. MS folks still don't even know that VFP is in their repertoire. Gartner still has VFP on its death list (I take it).
>

I challenge you to look at the marketing efforts of VFP5 and 6 and compare them to VFP3. You'll see it was much improved. For the record, Robert joined MS about the VFP5 time. As for Gartner, they will never retract what they said. They are not going to admit they made a mistake.

Once again, you can't compare the marketing of VFP to VB or VS. If you want to do a proper comparison, look at the amount of marketing for Works compared to Office.