This is the pattern that I have seen, see now, and think will continue to see. For a long time, the population of VFP developers has not been replenished at the rate they have been lost. Some will say this is me spouting off an opinion as fact. I think it is fairly well known that there are not as many VFP developers as there were 5 years ago. As I have said time and time again, no matter where you look, in the aggregate, you cannot find an upward trend in the Fox market. Numbers of developers, opportunities, etc, it is all down in the aggregate. There may be pockets here and there with good news. In the aggregate however, and that is how MS looks at this stuff, it is a series of downward trends.

No question that Fox is a profitable product, but one that is closely managed. There are those that will label me a pathalogical liar, s-bag, or whatever. However, the one fact that is crystal clear now, what Ken has said here now and the past few months confirms what I have been saying for 2+ years. Bottom line, if your market segment does not have demand, it will not get the requisite resources. Couple this with the push of .NET, and it spells bad news for Fox.

This issue is purely a business one, not a technial one. Shops that cannot find talent for thier tool of choice, until human cloning becomes possible and/or sanctioned, have ONE option; switch to a development tool that garners the demand of developers.It is a process that will continue to gain momentum until the day finally comes where there are not enough people to purchase upgrades. As I said before, the great irony is that those VFP developers who went down the MSDN path, while it was a tremendous value for them, it dillutes the revenue for Fox since it only gets a percentage, and I would bet a small percentage. Granted, this is speculation on my part, but I think it is a reasonable conclusion.

Who knows when the end will come and quite frankley, if you take the time to prepare yourself, you should not care. I analogize development tools with cars. I could care less which car models they cancel. Whatever cars are available when I am ready to make a purchase, I get the one that will suit my needs and drive off. The same is true for development tools; pick the one that suits your needs and drive off...

If there is one difference today, it is the brutally frank talk coming from MS and particularly Ken. In another separate thread, somebody said that MS should either promote the hell out of the product or kill it, but in any case, stop pussy footing around. I have been saying this now for 4 years.

This fence-riding mentality by MS, hoping that the situation would right itself has IMO, given a bunch of folks false hope. Things like the Steve Ballmer video do one thing, appease the masses, but in the end, they don't really change things.

Lately, my ethics have been challenged. As a former leader in this community, I always looked at the position I earned as a privledge that garnered a level of trust. It meant to me that I should always tell it like it is. Unethicial behavior IMO, is that which people who prize their position so much, they won't tell you the true story. In the end, I would do it the same way.

Bottom line, when a company tells you they only market a product to the existing customer base and are not interested in new customers for the product, the product is basically dead. IMO, the seeds were laid some 9 years ago when the unified tools strategy was announced in Orlando in 1993. By 1996, the fate was sealed. Who knows what the plans for Fox were in 1995 when 3.0 came out, but I do know this, the reign of Jon Sigler (anybody remember him) did irreversable harm to the product. From that point on, it has been damage control. Whatever the reason, Fox was left in the dust, never to recover, never to be part of the core focus of MS. The core focus is .NET and that is what the field offices are tasked with selling.

It is time that people put their emotions in check and look at the situation for the reality it presents. You may not like the messenger and you may not like the message, but that does not diminish the veracity of the message.


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There is a whole new generation of developers who won't be using VFP...and it will die because of it. Even if it's the 'better tool' for the job, organizations will choose not to use it because 'no one else does' and they wont be able to find any entry level programmers who want to mess with it. Furthermore as this pattern progresses you're going to loose existing VFP customers for all the same reasons - myself included!
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