Has anyone been to a Microsoft Technical Sales Specialist Seminar lately? I attended one in St. Louis today and found the Evaluation Form to be missing our favorite language under available choices for your Database Specialties.

It listed MS SQL, MS Access, Oracle, DB2 and Other as choices.

I wrote in the comments area that they forgot to list Microsoft Visual FoxPro on their eval sheet and also informed the MS Rep about it's absence as well. She just kind of looked at me in a dull stare without a response.

The seminar was to help teach consultants, developers, resellers and system builders how to make money in the ever decreasing profit margins of today's market. She showed us how to use the wizard to import several Excel spreadsheets into Access and then how to upsize the Access Database to SQL Server. However, she did mention that Access was not intended to be a multi-user database and that it slows down rather quickly as more users access the data. So that's why they have MS SQL. She was trying to demonstrate that we could go in and charge clients to take them out of their single user spreadsheets and build database applications by importing the data into Access or SQL. She didn't cover the analysis, data modelling or data integrity rules that might be necessary. I was also amazed at their hourly rates that they included on their PowerPoint charts we could be charging to do this kind of stuff. They listed rates between $150/hr - $250/hr.

Then I mentioned to another consultant attending the seminar that they didn't mention VFP and he said that the Microsoft office in Chicago helped him resolve problems with a project using VFP and they told the customer to switch to SQL Server because the product life cycle was ending in 2nd or 3rd quarter of the following year for VFP. More of the uninformed MS staff that needs to be a little educated. I also mentioned the current MS Job Posting for the Visual FoxPro Software Design Engineer. He was a former Clipper developer and is no longer a developer just a network consultant.

I was just posting this here to help alert Ken and others on the VFP Team of a few more places that needed to be educated. Especially, the TS2 Seminar people since their evaluation and expertise form didn't list Visual FoxPro before other Non-MS products. However, we must keep in mind that this was not a seminar aimed at developers. But I would like to be charging that $250/hr rate they showed.

Go Ken Go!