>No. I chose GLGDWS. Unfortunately can't do both.
>
>>Alex:
>>
>>>Are you going to GLGDWS ?
>>
>>Are you coming to Devcon Ft. Lauderdale?

Alejandro,

It is already seven years from San Diego, can you believe it?
And it is amazing how much things have changed, San Diego was the biggest FoxPro conference ever, now they are saying the expected attendance will be 500, what a pain, precisely now when VFP is better than ever...
Anyway, I'll be there and we are completing the bucks for Maria too. I guess we'll see you in some other time.

Thinking on ways for "helping" M$ sell more VFP boxes, I pushed in my company to include a full version of VFP with each license of the new version of our product. I guess, my reasoning was sound -better support on site than using my command window replacement-, and it was approved, so they will be 150 to 200 more VFP 7 boxes sold in Jan 2003.

But that is not enough.
Then, I remembered Novell had an "amnesty campaign" for Netware years ago, it was a huge success for them.
Netware was hugely pirated in South America, so it was "popular"; acknowledging the problem, Novell launched a marketing campaign to "legitimize" copies with real licenses at an very attractive price. They sold a lot, created revenue and customers than are loyal up to date.

Visual FoxPro is one of the most popular languages/databases in the world, people here may believe it or not.
Pirated copies are all over, from Asia to East Europe to South America: we need to understand, with the economies being so different, USD$300 is very difficult to pay if your monthly salary or income is in the $100-$200 range.
I'm not condoning piracy, I'm just pointing out were the problem has its roots.

So this is my advice to Ken: launch a six months amnesty campaign for VFP around the world, price it at $99.99 -or so-, in order to participate, people must send to the local M$ office the pirated media and/or manuals.
To be in tune with the actual marketing mantra, the campaing may explain VFP is the perfect companion to .NET, etc...
Include in the VFP CD a page with links to all VFP related sites; maybe negotiate with Michael a discounted PUTM for those guys too, you-name-here-more-details, etc

I'm sure this effort will be fruitful and that we will gather a huge crowd that now is totally on the loose, silent and not generating a penny.

What do you think? Comment on this please. If you think the idea has value, we can start a new thread in the Chatter section and on the Wiki.