This is beautifully written and thought out. Really cogent.

The part below is especially relevant to my business model - the Fortune 500,000 customers - the entrepeneurs who started a business, made a ton of money and can't take a day off because all the business rules are in their heads and they can't sell the business because without them it can't function. But off-load that knowledge into a custom business system and you've made them a *lot* of money and they will cheerfully pay you a lot of money and refer you to their friends. I've been doing it for ten years and will probably be doing it another ten.

Your points about not crying out for web apps and not being willing to give up a very sophisticated UI particularly strike home.

The question is not is Fox better than something else or more popular for something else - the question is what are Fox's strengths and what do you want to do when you get up in the morning. I find those two things meld very well.

If you can make or save your client more money than you cost them, they will love you and they will pay you and they will refer you.

With the right clientbase and income and free-time secured, you have time to dabble in .Net or whatever until you see a use for it and the gurus have made it painless.

Meanwhile, making a living is not a problem as there are far more clients like yours and mine than there are IT departments who want "employees" and tell them what language to use and only let them touch a little part of the Elephant.

Of course it makes it harder to impress other programmers with what really cool, cutting edge stuff you're doing. <s> and nobody wants you to talk about it at Devcon or write articles about it.

Fair enough. A 1099 is the sincerest form of flattery.



I learned programming long ago as an intellectual game, never planning to do it for a living. I continue to learn various computer things because i find them interesting. Some day one may grab me like Fox did and show me a way to make money doing something i really enjoy.

If not - as I've often said - I get paid to solve business problem. My clients don't care if I use Foxpro or voodoo dolls.

>This is were I see many more niche applications that can be quickly created and made available to a much larger market. Sure, there is a lot of large corporations in the world that need large high end databases. But I believe that there are a lot more small to medium sized size business entities than those large
>corporations to market your services to.<<

>The DOT COM fever has subsided and the hype that everything will be on the web just doesn't hold up for small businesses who rely upon their back office software for making their money and not a flashy web front end and who also can't afford to invest in the monthly overhead of bandwidth and secure servers and firewalls, etc. Some business models can become more efficient with some of their data available on the web but not all of it. My biggest problem with thin client is also the lack of a robust UI. It's extremely difficult to create drag and drop applications in a web based form where you could drop a part number onto an order form in another window or a customer onto an order, etc. Or when launching multiple windows with different patients displayed at the same time because you were entering some patient data, while another one called requesting some information on their account, while another walks in the door and needs to have their information pulled up quickly as well. Browser
>based is just too painful when you're used to that kind of flexibility.

>My clients rarely ask me what I use to develop their applications in. They just like that they go fast and I can make changes and add ons quickly to meet their needs>