>Hi Jess,
>
>Do you remember history? MS bought FoxBase. May be it saved life to our favorite product?
>When people ask me again about my working tool - I with proud answer MICROSOFT FoxPro,
>they will not have any question because they belive in Microsoft (and automatically FoxPro)
>future (and they sign contract with me for developing program).

I will not argue with you if we are talking about developer tools. With business apps, it's a different story because we are users of MS developer tools to create business apps or end-user apps for a living.

Let's say we have an Accounting Software for sale about $1000 and here is an MS Accounting System that offers almost the same features at $1200, company X will choose the latter because of the MS name. In addition they have the money to support everything not for survival but for enhancement. With that scenario, how can we survive long term? We might end-up selling MS Accounting...

>But who knows, big business and big policy are so complicated...
>
>
>>With the unmatched $ that MS has in its pocket, it has the capability to buy all possible products, and/or companies to make them even more powerful in the market. They bought Great Plains and now they're buying Navision. With this in mind, even small and/or medium companies that develop software products like us will die simply. Isn't this a form of entering into another monopoly?
>>
>>Please understand...