Rod,

First, you discount WhilH's publications. Then you ignore that conference attendance generally is DOWN. Finally you ignore that most magazines, and especially the PC-related magazines, have gotten much thinner and have 'dated' articles too.

But the real problem that I have is: WHY DOES IT MATTER??? And why did it matter so much to JVP?

I can tell you today that .NET will decline and I guarantee you that I will be right!
People have written for decades that COBOL and Fortran are dead languages. They too will be right some day!

The only thing that JVP could have hoped to accomplish by his continued rantings on VFP's demise was to accelerate the demise of VFP. That, frankly, is an objective that is not worthy of this forum or any other.

I have no doubt that at least some VFP developers took JVP's words to heart and did MOVE to some other language/platform. Are we supposed to think that that is a good thing and applaude it???

By the way, you made a point in your original reply regarding people being silenced if they don't toe the line. I think there are numerous examples here that handily refute that assertion too.

Jim



>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