Dana;

I cannot tell you how many times I have seen the same thing. Well, I can tell you I worked for thirteen companies in a 6 year span who believed what you just described. Most are out of business. By the way I quit each one before the roof fell in! :)

A friend of mine described the reality of business decisions with these words, “Our problem is that we just do not understand the big picture”! What is important to the decision makers is to have a golden parachute so when they screw up they can move on to another company (with a nice wad of cash in his/her pocket) and impose his/her golden rules on yet another victim.

Reality and successful experience are not what count. The movers and shakers pat each other on the back and congratulate his/her incompetence, while you work twenty-hour days trying to make up for it. Then you are told, “Sorry, we are out of business”!

Latest official figure for Silicon Valley - 127,000 programming jobs lost since April 2001. When I say lost that is like the companies are no longer in existance. Who needs a business plan? :)

Tom

>Where I worked until recently we had several FoxPro applications. Two of them MAJOR works. These two, unfortunately, were still in FoxWin 2.6. I tried for a couple of years to convince my boss to let me begin moving them over to Visual FoxPro, but he claimed it would take too many man-hours and he needed me on more important things. Then we underwent another change, a new CEO, and we began to hear that the applications, and FoxPro, were old technology and he wanted them to go. He might not have thought that if I had moved them up. He drove the move to IBM's WebSphere and Oracle Financials. The company is sinking fast and they still haven't gotten the WebSphere to do what they want, or even what they need. And Financials, eeeewww! I had users complaining that what took them 1.5 minutes to do in the FoxPro application now took 15 minutes in Oracle! Ten times longer. Now THAT's productivity!
>
>Unfortunately, that mindset is entrenched out there. What I don't understand is why these same people want VB and Access working for a business. Even with the hijacked Rushmore engine, Access is still a dog compared to VFP!
>
>
>>I sent this letter to this poor uninformed lackey of MS hype.
>>

>>"Look beyond the glossy cover of the next box of dev software that you are given for evaluation, and then compare it to the astounding depth of flexibility and power of the "dead" Foxpro. You will find that VFP 7.0 (soon to be 8.0) is incredibly powerful, immensly articulate, with astonishlingly rich syntax and functions. Do not be confused, or mislead by marketing hype, VFP is THE Killer App that no one knows about, and MICROSOFT DOES NOT want you to know about (SQLSERVER is not required for growth beyond ACCESS). Check under her skirt, and revel at the wonders of true powerful database programming language. This IS the real deal, this is what true progamming art is all about."
>>

>>
>>Glenn Domeracki
>>
>>>ZDNet published "Where old software goes to die" by Larry Seltzer (zdnet@larryseltzer.com) where he says:
>>>
>>>..."Database software is the other major type of platform in this sense, and it's no surprise to find a lot of old
>>>database software still available. dBase, Clipper, and of course FoxPro, can all still be bought (dBase and Clipper still as DOS programs)"...
>>>
>>>http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2908745,00.html
>>>
>>>So? What are we waiting to inundate this genius' email (and ZDNet's) for their excelence in reporting?