John,

I'm less knowledgeable with the other products than you are. I agree with you that as a concept VFP is great.

Like most of the people who use it, I regret that M$ does not see it that way. Their support is at best lukewarm in terms of technical quality and marketing. VFP5 _was_ a major improvement over VFP3 and as Craig pointed out, lately there seems to be some change in their marketing approach.

I too am impressed with the stability one can obtain with VFP in production, and you just inform me that this is not always the case with the other products.

M$'s ways are misterious, and I am not going to even try to understand the reasoning. My guess though is that they are just deciding not to decide, leaving things pretty much the way they are, until something comes up that forces them into one or the other direction.

Contrary to some, I think that this situation is not healthy. Managers do not only decide on the product that you are going to develop today, but also if your product will be maintainable in the future. True, it is difficult to foresee more than 2 years in advance, but this fact allone forces them into a conservative attitude. And this biases their decision toward a product that might be less adequate, more expensive, but that they perceive as being more mainstream.

My 2 BEF,

Marc


>The problem (for us) with MS is that they are not going to aggressively market any development tool (like VFP) that eats into marketshare for their precious little VB. VB is astoundingly mediocre or lacking entirely in areas that VFP excels at: data access, visual objects (heck, ANY objects), inheritance, polymorphism, subclassing, etc...Not wanting to commit fraticide with their product lines, they appear rudderless in marketing and evangelism of VFP.
>
>What they really need to do is position VFP as the alternative to Powerbuilder, Personal Oracle, and Delphi. Having worked with all three to one degree or another, I can state that VFP blows them away as a RAD tool and, for the most part, in stability.
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>My 2 cents, anyhow.