Rod;

And we wonder why Microsoft does not increase marketing of Visual FoxPro? How about suggesting Microsoft sell VFP 8.0 at $8000 a copy? That would increase revenue and perhaps more could be put into advertising? Surely $8000 is not too much for an avid VFP developer to pay for his/her favorite software development tool?

Without doubt the interest in VFP January 1995 at Devcon was greater than at recent events of this type. VFP still has its place. I am glad it is not the only tool I use. I use what I get paid for regardless of how much I like VFP.

Tom


>Hi Terry,
> Thanks for the reply. I am not a doomsayer or oracle of doom. I am just trying to apply business sense to the foxpro market when making a decision. My findings are from looking at the long term trends of the VFP market in general and not looking at this one year for my benchmark.
>
>When you take a look at the long term trend of the Visual FoxPro market you can only find a market on a slow and steady decline. I use DevCon as my benchmark. It has steadily gone from 2500+ plus people to around 700 (from what I heard about this year).
>
>Also the VFP book market has gone from probably 15+ books on Fox 2.x to maybe one now. I dont count whil's books here because I cannot generally find them in mass marketers of books (Borders, Barnes and Noble, etc.)
>
>Next the Visual FoxPro publications, FoxTalk and FPA have steadily gone down in subscribers/print runs and page count(FPA, not too sure about FoxTalk). Every year you can read their counts and they have steadily gone down.
>
>So taking all of these into account you can only sumise that the market is declining or does your evidence prove otherwise ?
>
>If the market were better publishers would print more books. They are much better at market analysis than I am. My guess is that VFP does not justify the resources it takes to get a book to market. Also, how come many of the people here and on the VFP conference circuit are not writing books for a major publisher ? If the market is so healthy they could probably convice a publisher to put out a book.
>
>Anyway from what I can see people here seem to ignore the facts and trends of the market. Hopefully it wont be too costly for them in the future.
>Thanks
>Rodman