Ken,

Let me take a stab at clearing this up..

First, you need to get at what the community, or at least this one person, perceives as the definition of support. I think the community sees the word as something that implies promotion and a good dose of new and significant features on a periodic basis. I think MS views support in somewhat minimalist terms. Somewhere in the middle, Fox sits. It does not get promoted, and while there may be new features, the budget for what can be done is very tight and constrained.

A year ago, when you took over, I think many thought a miracle was going to occur, that somehow you alone or with the assistance of the community, the downward trend of VFP was going to be reversed. I will always believe that one of the worst things that could have happened was the Steve Ballmer Video. Where a lot of people may have finally accepted reality, that video pretty much put a lot of folks back in the world of denial and a false sense of security. IMO, while it did short term good for giving people in the community the warm fuzzies, in the long run, it was a disservice. I suspect that during that 90 seconds while Mr. Ballmer was reading the cue cards for the video, that is the only time in recent memory the words FoxPro came out of his lips.

I said it to you in the recent past and to Robert and Ricardo for several years prior that the laissez faire approach to how the VFP market was going to be handled was a bad idea. IMO, there were two basic options. One, the VFP market was cultivated to grow. Two, the VFP market was going to be marshalled to another environment so that they could get into the mainstream of MS tools and support. IAC, clear and honest communication is/was paramount. Hoping that things will right itself will not work and in the end, you will be left with a situation that will be more difficult to deal with now as opposed to dealing with it at the beginning.

Take a proactive role to devlop migration plans for those developers that either want to or need to go to .NET.



>>> Does not supporting developer market especially database one, which is backbone of every IS MS will strike lost market share in all other products. <<
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>I have no idea what you are referring to here. VFP is a fully supported product and Microsoft is working on an exciting new version of VFP (Toledo, VFP 8.0). This combined with Visual Studio .NET and other developer tools, databases, etc.