Allow me to clarify, because perhaps I was being a tad unfair.

Ultimately, if you go high enough up the abstraction ladder, I'm sure that budget comes into play in every business decision in every company. If I go into the supplies room and there are no pencils, perhaps someone was trying to save a buck or two.

But, as far as I can honestly recall, no reasonable enhancement to VFP that I've been a party to has ever been shot down directly by budgetary concerns. And, for damn sure, no enhancement has been killed during my tenure because it would make VFP look "too good".

Quite the opposite on the latter: Hypothetically, let's say that one of our crack devs finds a way to create a function that can identify dirty data (like malformed street addresses) with extreme accuracy. So we implement a new SYS function for this.

Man, this turns us into the cock of the walk in MS. We show it off and other product teams look to see how they could do this in their tools. No one is going to worry about this from a competitive aspect within the company - rather, all will eventually benefit.


>It is also bad policy to make a blatent mis-statement - such as the one by JK. It is absolutely important for people to understand why something may not make it in. The sad fact is - many features don't make it in because they are not cost-justified. MS having billions upon billions in the bank nothwithstanding - there are still budgets to respect. That is just good business.