> Reason: the VB app was purely superficial - with all those great UI presentation - but sucks in terms of performance.

Yes, exactly this will happens.
VB.Net with wonderful interface, with many services, easy to learn from low qualified developers will lose competition with free of charge GNU C++, because of low performance.
If Microsoft couldn't offer strong database tools it will lose competition not only in business applications, but in OS also.
There are some questions to us - Is it possible to develop FoxPro application for Linux? May be this will be future winning clone of "dead horse". I already know about some attempts this to be done with old FP Unix versions.