Hi Ken,

"profit center" accounting, which I read is de rigeur within MS, is no substitute for strategic planning, looking beyond the immediate context and beyond the moment. To complement what Brian says, the decision to not have further VFP tests because there was not much response may make sense from the point of view of "did the tests support the costs involved." But it shows Microsoft to be less than fully supportive of VFP, removing an extremely useful point of credibility when selling products based on VFP, and thus the decision undercuts the product.

I guess most of the folks at MS are too young to remember when the Sears bean counters introduced cost center accounting in the late 60's, early 70's. They almost killed the company, because they lost the big picture of why people came into the stores in the first place.

We all realize these aren't your decisions; let's hope the folks figuratively upstairs wake up.

Hank

>This was probably intentional on the part of the Visio team, nothing to do with the VFP team nor some "campaign" you are imagining. You must understand that every effort in a product takes time to design, code, test, document, etc. It is obvious that the Visio team does not view their core customer base is not VFP developers, and I'm sure that is very true. In order to support old ODBC driver technology with security issues and such, it takes a fair amount of resources.
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>My guess is that the Visio team evaluated how much it would take to do this in a new version and all the issues and compared it to other features they wanted to add, and chose they wanted to do things for the mass customer base than a small group. It is a justified business decision for the Visio group to make, and it does not involve VFP or the VFP team. You may very well be the only customer the Visio team knows who wants this, and not many products put features in or spend resoures on them if there is only "one" customer asking for it. Just don't look at it at a FoxPro-specific view, it is a customer demand issue versus other things.