While I agree with much of what you say here, a few things do come to mind...

1) Does anyone even know what running Yukon in "compatibility mode" really means?

2) Is Yukon otherwise so NEEDED-feature-laden that it will quickly be adopted in most companies' 5-year plans?

3) Does there ever come a time when a business decision maker says to him/herself 'hmmm, I spend an awful lot of money and time implementing MS latest and greatest and all during that time I can't deliver new needed functionality to my users. But I do tell them how much better it will be once we've jumped this hurdle'???

4) Does anyone worry that soon MS' market for this fancy new stuff will all/only be overseas? And that the only businesses left here will be your small businesses that can neither afford all this fancy/shmancy stuff nor has a need for much (any?) of it?

The world is changing fast and it isn't only your Linux threat any more. There is outsourcing and there is installed and productive EXISTING systems. MS' market may not be what they think it is if they continue to use the model of the past.

cheers

>For those developers that focus on vertical apps, there may still be a strong future with VFP for them. For everyone else though, it is definitely questionable at this time. As we all know, businesses tend to have a five year IT plan. If the business plans to move to Yukon in that five year plan in order to leverage the new capabilities of it, where does that leave the development staff? Moving to a tool that will also leverage those new features of course. What business would invest in Yukon but intentionally run it in compatibility mode? That would be lost dollars and makes no sense. I for one was very adament about requesting the report writer be improved in VFP for years. Yet had I known that having the report writer enhanced would effectively cut the throat of VFP for leveraging it with newer technologies, I would have definitely have changed course. I can not see developing new modules and apps in a business that will migrate to Yukon with VFP with the next version at
>least. If we knew however that the version following Europa would include the ability to play in the Yukon sandbox then that would be a different story. The same holds true for Longhorn. It looks like MSFT has just put the nails in the coffin of VFP like never before. Always in the past declaring VFP dead ahead of time proved to be false and those individuals were considered doomsday sayers. Now that torch has been passed to MSFT. We may be able to continue on with VFP but for how long? Only those businesses that do not plan their IT out in the future or have the luxury of choosing a backend and frontend tool based on current requirements (not future ones) will be likely candidates.
>
>I just wondered if maybe there will be a VS Data product in the future...