I received an interesting response from Max Goebel of ProMatrix, which I thought I would share with the rest of the FoxPro community. He states that FoxPro user groups are mostly hobbyists. I disagree with this statement. I appreciate his marketing effort, which I needed to read, but I do not think people at LAFox, OCFOX, San Diego FOX or Valley West FOX are just hobbyists. I would say that the majority of them are in a continuous state of learning and are seriously working toward perfection in Visual FoxPro, as I am also doing.

I also consider Visual MaxFrame to be a superior framework and not an application generator as is ProMatrix. For serious developers, I believe Visual MaxFrame, Mere Mortals and some other frameworks would precede Visual ProMatrix for serious development, as they have an open architecture. Refer to SDT as an example of this.

I also wonder why it is that I don't know any Visual ProMatrix users from the various user groups I have attended? Do they separate themselves from the FoxPro community? If so, why?


Hi Cecil,

Thank you for your interest in Visual ProMatrix.

We've been selling a ProMatrix framework since 1994. So, we probably have more users than most other framework vendors combined. We've sold over 10,000 copies of ProMatrix in its various versions since 1994.

Our marketing focus is on professional FoxPro developers who need to create professional applications that work.

Around 50% of our users are located outside the U.S. FoxPro is very popular in Europe and S.E. Asia.

We have done little marketing to FoxPro user groups because our early marketing experience showed us that most user group members are not professionals, but rather tend to be hobbyists. That may vary from group to group, but generally we think it's true. Consequently, user group members generally have migrated to lower priced frameworks like Visual Maxframe that do not provide all the tools and features that ProMatrix provides, and that's probably not a bad choice for most user group members.

The following links on the ProMatrix Web will help you evaluate frameworks:

http://www.promatrix.com/vpme/how_to_choose.htm

http://www.promatrix.com/vpme/vpm_faqs.htm

http://www.promatrix.com/vpme/vpmcompa.htm

Briefly, the things that set Visual ProMatrix apart from other frameworks are:
Features: no other framework provides all the tools and features that VPM provides.
Performance: VPM's performance is clearly superior.
Stability: VPM's stability is well known among VFP developers.
Support: One look at the ProMatrix Newsgroups shows that no other framework provides as much support.
VPM Users: There are far more VFP developers using VPM than any other framework.
Among the frameworks that you are considering, Visual ProMatrix is in a class way above Visual Maxframe. Visual Maxframe provides about 20% of the functionality of VPM. If you are looking for a framework that will help you quickly build complete, professional applications, Visual Maxframe isn't it.

In comparison, Visual ProMatrix:
Provides many more tools and features for your applications.
Is much more stable.
Provides much better performance.
Provides valuable add-on tools that you can purchase as needed, such as the ProMatrix Multilingual Toolkit, ProMatrix Source Control Kit, ProMatrix Doc Kit, xCase2VPM and VPM2Foxfire.
If you have any other questions, please don't hesitate to ask. You can call 1-800-889-7058.

Regards,
Max Goebel
ProMatrix Corporation