>>>Stating that I think the "VFP Market" is shrinking is not the same as you stating matter-of-factly that "VFP 8 ain't selling to good."
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>>I presented evidence before making that statement. I think it was the first message of the thread. It was not 'matter of fact'. Furthermore, look at what Strahl, Petersen, Macneish, Hentzen and other Foxpro heavyweights are saying. Add to this some of the statistics cited... and i'd have to stand by my statement that VFP 5 and 6 sold way way better than VFP 8.
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>>If you have any evidence contridicting this I'd be glad to view it. If all you wanna do is play semantic word games I'll pass.
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>This is not semantics. You have offered no evidence of poor sales for me to contradict, just as no one here has evidence that sales are good. You can not necessarily extrapolate a decline in VFP developers as an indication of poor VFP8 sales. Strahl, Petersen, Macneish and Hentzen have no more access to MS sales figures than you or I do. I do, however, respect their insights.


When a new version of Foxpro comes out the third party tool suppliers modify/update/improve their tools taking advantage of the new features of the new version. Also, their customer base is moving to the newest version(a certain percentage does anyhow). If we look at tools like Stonefield, Mere Mortals, Web Connection etc etc(we could list 20 or so major 3rd party tools). I'd say the improvements provided by these independent software vendors is much lower than improvements made for versions 5 and 6 of VFP. If the sales of VFP 8 are as good as VFP 5 and 6 then I do not believe all these companies would ignore their customer base.

Personally, I am happy with Codemine, Stonefield, and Web Connection. I use these products every week. However, the improvements made due to VFP 8's release are minimal. All of these products have a significant customer base. I believe these various independent third party VFP add on tool vendors are NOT ignoring their customers. Their customer base is not upgrading to VFP 8.

Add that up with Macneish's comments about the bottom dropping out of the add on tools market, and many other comments made by top vfp guys and I'd say VFP 8 is not selling as well as VFP 5 or 6.

For the first six months VFP 8 was out it was difficult to buy in Canada. That never happened with any previous versions. How can sales be good when buying the product is made difficult? If customers were contacting ProgrammersParadise.ca frantically requesting VFP 8 .. well why wouldnt they supply it? There just wasnt much demand...

There is a tonne of additional evidence that VFP 8 is not selling as well as previous versions; these are items I can name off the top of my head.


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>Our User Group has paid for 3 of those 4 to speak at our User Group meetings over the past 2 years. I am still working on getting JVP to commit to a date. McNeish and Hentzen have been here within the last 3 months.
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>Our objective in having McNeish, Hentzen and JVP to speak at our UG now is to give our members ideas, introduction to dev tools, and options where they can make informed decisions on what direction they need to be taking to improve their professional abilities.