>I don't get it, and never have - since the takeover
>from fox software - Why does microsoft treat Foxpro like its ugly step
>child - no respect

Jon,

I'd like to take your message as an opportunity to give my two cents on this question. The following is strictly my opinion as I have thought about the question and my ideas of what may happen in the future (the ideas may not happen at all).

Microsoft is a huge company with 10's of thousands of people working in it. Not all of these people know all about all of the company's products. When any person is asked to make a recommendation about something they will, invariably, recommend something they know about and somewhat understand. Most of the MS employee's know about Visual Basic as it is "Everyone's programming language", that is it is designed to be easy to use and easy to learns so that everyone from the weekend hobbiest to the professional developer can use it. Its user base is counted in the millions (Fox OTOH is counted in the 100,000's). Most MS folks know Access because it is part of the Office suite of products, its user base is also counted in millions.

Add to this the fact that MOST MS employee's are NOT developers or programmers and they have little or no knowledge or understanding of programming languages and what makes one preferable over another and you begin to see whay the MS words we hear from these MS people is not pointing to Fox as the big winner. This group of people are pointing to VB, the only programming language they know anything about, or Access, the only database manager they know anything about. This group almost never suggests VC++, VJ++, Visual Interdev, or VFP because they don't understand those products or how to use them.

OK, is the above is true for MOST of the MS people, what about the marketing of the developer products, why doesn't this effort put more of Fox in the front. The answer, I think, is found in this analysis. VFP is the ONLY developer product that can do all things required by an application without any other component being necessary. VB needs a database, VC++ needs a database and components (or else the development scheduled begins to be measured in centuries instead of months), VJ++ needs everything <g>, SQL Server needs a user interface, ... on and on. BUT VFP needs nothing else. So why is this aproblem? Because MS is in the business of selling products not building user applications and VFP limits the sales of other MS products.

If someone uses VB they will nmostly likely be using other MS products as well, or at least requiring that the client has other MS products. This isn't always true with VFP. So the marketing and sales team sees VFP as a sort of threat to their overall bottom line and they aren't willing to push VFP at the cost of hurting sales of other MS products.

So what does the future hold as a promiss for us? Well, it appeared to me at Devcon that the next version of VFP (Tahoe) is being aimed at playing very well in the middle tier of the N-Tier development model. With the introduction of apartment model multithreading and the other improvements being made to allow VFP to play nice with Microsoft Transaction Server and the COM and DCOM objects, VFP becomes a premier tool for building business logic objects. VFP has a local data engine allowing some very interesting things to be done relating to this business logic and allowing a fuller offloading of these activities from teh database backend servers.

This makes me think that perhaps VFP will become more specialized withint the Visual Studio suite of products and thus will able to be marketed WITHOUT hurting the sales of other MS products. If this does happen then it is possible that the motivation for NOT pushing VFP may go away. It is much easier for the VFP marketing team to get others inside the company to proote the product if the product does NOT hurt other sales.

This is just my opinion and it may or may not have any basis in reality.