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If they really wanted to get people to move on why bother putting in any new development at all. Why not just pull the plug today.
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It is a fine line that has to be walked. For one thing - the US gov't is a big VFP user. And - there is a significant part of the customer base that will not move to .NET. Ultimately, MS wants to keep and extract $'s from this customer base. To a significant extent, MS can easily do this through MSDN Subscriptions. For those that still only buy Fox, it makes sense for MS to say spend $.25 to make $1.00 (hypothetical numbers of course).

Given the divergent paths of MS and VFP - at some point - MS will not be able to walk that fine line and the product will eventually go into maintence mode. For the pure Fox-App developers - there will still be at least 6.5 years of support. If MS pulled the plug today - a good chunk of Fox developers would stay put - praying that something new that is Fox-Like would come along. And, as long as $'s can be made - pure Fox-App developers will not have to move. I say pure Fox-App developers because it is becoming increasingly less clear how much Fox will be able to play in the managed code-based application space. My guess is that to a large extent - Fox will still be able to play - but that point is not crystal clear coming from MS - and my opinion is only a guess.

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