>>I continue to be amazed that anybody would bother to defend a company with $40+ billion in the bank.
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>That doesn't sound very logical.

Here's how its logical to me, Mike... they can afford to defend themselves.
Now if they had (only) $400,000. in the bank, that would be another story. Such an outfit, assuming it made worthy product, would be helped across the threshhold of success by such help. MS doesn't "need" the help, doesn't merit the help, and needs some honest criticism.
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>>Weirdly, I guess, I would have thought that people would use that little fact to prove that MS could well afford to spend a tiny miniscule iotic fraction of that money to improve the lot of VFP overall.
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>What makes you think thats not whats happening?

Craig B., as anticipated, answers that one nicely for you by saying that we can have new features including (some) bug fixes or we can have bug fixes, but we can't have both.
My point is that MS has $40+ billion and they can "well afford to spend a tiny miniscule iotic fraction of that money to improve the lot of VFP overall" by giving us both, as they do for their other developer products.