>>OK, thanks for the clarification. Sure, I agree that there are people at MS who take this whole "communities" thing at face value. But suddenly it all makes sense what's really going on. I was wondering how long it would take MS to realize that the term .NET just doesn't cut it any more. I mean the association with the .COM fiasco is just too hard to miss, no matter how much money Microsoft wants to throw at it. So they came up with a new term: communities. That sounds a lot more palatable than the thoroughly nauseating "one degree of separation" crapola. I didn't understand what was going on until just now. After all, Microsoft is so fundamentally opposed to any authentic concept of "community", you have to wonder what they're up to. Did you ever see a show called "The Prisoner"? They had a very charming concept of community, too.
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>This is a good point and I'm surprise no one ever mentioned it. Considering the fact that a lot of Web sites have the .net extension and most of them don't know what it means. Some will see it as a .ca, .us, etc. and some others will see it to show that their company is doing some networking stuff and all kind of stuff like that. The .net extension has one purpose. It can be for all purposes at the same time. So, yes, I believe .NET should have been name something else from MS. Also, if you call it in French, "Point NET", it really doesn't sound good. :)
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>Another interesting thing is that they did a lot of work to come up with Visual Studio. Then, it was in place. So, why haven't they concentrated by keeping that name instead of creating a new set of terminologies. They have Visual Studio.NET today so I guess it could have fill the name pretty right. The next think you'll know is that Visual Studio.NET is no longer there. So, it would have last for a few years. I'm still happy to know that Visual FoxPro is a great mature product with one of the greatest history at MS. A lot of developers may not realize that but it's been there since the mid 80's. I can't say the same for VB and VS.
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>As for communities, I'm sure it'd be interesting to start a survey to know for how many years people think that term would be used. I'm still wondering what's gonna be the new buzz word for 2003.

Ricardo Wenger is now in charge of Communities for all of VS (don't know if that includes VFP). Since he has a strong VFP background I wonder what his take would be on the POV that you and Mike are espousing.