When I look down a busy steet, I see a lot of Carollas. Less frequently, a big Lexus.

Is the world of user entities driving Carollas, or are they driving Lexus (Lexii?:-)?

Would I profit more from opening a gas station for Lexus only - or would I do better selling gasoline to Carolla's?

Many prospects do not want their systems resigned to being an MSN appliance. They may want to run their own programs and may not want to risk some joy-riding hacker sneaking in through some security hole.

They may not want to pay for a fat team, long duration project.

The MS pendulam has swung beyond the point IBM took it in the late eighties. If user's are like me, they want to own, not lease [overly priced] solutions. I think the pedulum will either swing back, or users will go to lower cost open source.

Either way, the day of the monster servers has come again - and will wane again. People want to feel in control and secure. There are a lot more Carollas than Lexii:-)


>Terry,
>
>the success of TurboTax is a success of the company which wrote it and not a VFP sucecss story. There may be 10...20...100 TurboTax-like packages using VFP, however, VFP success would have been if there were 10,000...100,000 design-win enterpise projects which use of plan to use VFP. In reality, VFP programmers are not even invited for meetings to discuss these projects; and this is not because VFP is bad, but because VFP programmers do not drive their customers towards contemporary enterprise architecture, which is:
>
>- portal based
>- service orinted
>- thin-client
>- firewall friendly
>- deployment free
>- uses database with transaction support
>- etc., etc., etc...
>
>2GB limit was the size beyond imagination 10 years ago, and VFP was a viable choice in this aspect. However, now midsize company databases are no less then 10...20GB, and some tables definitely over 2GB. So, what was not an issue 10 years ago is a show-stopper now for more or less serious project.
>
>Igor.