Igor,

I think your analysis is one of the best I've seen posted here yet. I believe that VFP's downfall is it's failure to fit in the enterprise structure. This has nothing to do with Microsoft marketing.

Starting about 5 years ago, everytime a recruiter saw my resume they mentioned that most of the VFP work they saw was to help re-engineer an existing VFP app using another language. I have had several interviews and had discussions with others where rewrites were mentioned. Never in these discussions have I heard someone say that the rewrite is because MS is not supporting VFP. It is always because of where they want the company to go with their software development. And they view .Net or Java as a better way to get there. These decisions have been purely technical.

VFP is a legacy language. It has served its purpose well. However, much like the technical jobs that have gone overseas, never to come back, many of the VFP jobs that have disappeared will never come back. Because when the hiring begins again, it will be for a different language.

It has always been stated here by MS people that VFP will be marketed to the existing VFP market only. There are features that the enterprise is looking for that will never, ever exist in VFP. MS has acknowledged that the enterprise is their main market. VFP has an expiration date of 2010.

I have trouble understanding the resistance here on this board. I've known for a long time that I need to expand my skillset. I've looked at .Net on my own. Now I am in a situation where they will looking to replace VFP with Java in the next couple years. I work in a team of about 10 VFP programmers. Everyone I work with is on board to learn Java. No one is arguing that VFP is great and they don't want to learn anything else. That is the nature of our industry.


PF