Cindy:

>Many times managers want to drop VFP from use in their companies because "nobody uses it anymore," "Microsoft no longer supports it," or similar. If the goal is to prevent perfectly good and functional applications from being dropped due to misinformation like this then "activity" such as announcements will help the developers who support these applications from losing jobs or contracts.
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JVP:

A very good point. However, it is important that at best, this is a market stablization device. In other words, the goal is retention, not growth. In fact, I would go as far as to say that MS does not want to grow the VFP market.


Cindy:

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Maybe some believe/hope the VFP market will grow "substantially" because of Ken's efforts. I don't, and I don't think that is Ken's goal.
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JVP:

Many do believe this. These people have read way too much into what Ken and MS have done with regard to VFP.

This is where many, including the vocal minority need to wake up and smell the coffee. I could have said Java, but that would have been in poor taste! < g >


Cindy:
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I do believe that Ken's efforts will help those developers who have good ideas and working code from being squashed by uninformed managers, and I think that's Ken's goal.
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JVP:

Rentention and stabalization is the game. Of course, this is flawed to some degree because a market is either expanding or contract, it does not remain stable. Markets that appear stable - in reality have expansion rates that equal contraction rates - thus cancelling each other out.


Cindy:

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One more thing - here in a conservative environment (NT4 and Office97) I think .NET will be slow to catch on because of the percieved security issues and other unknowns. That makes the choices for new development either VFP or VB6. Since VB6 is not forward-compatible in the way VFP7 is, VFP has a distinct advantage.
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JVP:

When you say forward-compatible, do you mean web services? Be careful here!! VFP, in all material respects, has no more web service functionality than VB 6. As far as your security that is well taken as that is always a concern. As far as VFP being more forward-compatible than VB 6, I totally disagree with that conclusion.

Could you expand more on your "forward-compatible" premise???