Hey Rick,

I mentioned CDW because I know they sell a fair amount of VFP. I've seen them pull 100 copies in a day from the distributor. I'm guessing that since their customer base is more government and corporate than ours, they probably sell to larger customers and probably do more volume licensing than we do.

Of course we've sold to quite a few major corps ourselves.

I'm keeping a list of the niche companies that seem to have the best chance for "webitizing" parts of their apps and I'm telling them to look into "Web Connect" and the other VFP web solutions. Some have, but don't have the expertise or the infrastructure.

Those of us who have experience with VFP and the internet may need to help pull them along.

We have one company that we're going to be looking at either building them something or provide the development and our servers/data center in a joint venture in the next few weeks. We've already done some web service stuff for them.

They will keep marketing the desktop app, but adding the web side of it provides both an upgrade path for their bigger customers and an additional income stream from both small and large customers.

That's the kind of opportunity I see for VFP developers, unfortunately some of these situations may call for "creative relationships", like joint ventures, since most aren't going to be able to afford large re-development expenditures.

Jim Eddins
dbx-Technologies

>Hi Jim,
>
>That's great to hear!
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>However,
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>>In addition to that, it's obvious in my conversations with VFP developers that most haven't made the move to 8.0 yet, not because they aren't still developing with VFP, but because many of their customers haven't moved off the Win95/98/NT OS platforms yet.
>>
>>Sales for VFP 7.0 were also heavy this year, to the point that there isn't a single copy left anywhere as of around July of this year.
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>>Some people quote "job counts" to determine whether VFP is alive or dead. I have my own theories about all that, but I can say we've sold many copies of VFP, including volume licenses, to quite a few major corporations and virtually every branch of the federal government, as well as, state a municipal agencies. I know if we're getting those type sales, the CDW's of the world are to.
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>I think you've positioned yourself as a VFP friendly shop and are promoting to the VFP community and that brings you sales that the CDWs are probably not receiving now.
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>CDW and the like do not market VFP any more than Microsoft does - you do, and that's a good thing for you and the VFP community. This is the kind of constructive position that is a win win situation both for VFP and your company, rather than all the moaning and groaning about the perceived demise of VFP.
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>>However it's a different market than it has ever been. Large companies just aren't going to take the risks they've taken in the past on IT projects. They also are tired of the constant "upgrade" costs and overpriced solutions that Microsoft, Sun, IBM, SAP and Oracle keep throwing at them. All those companies are feeling the pinch.
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>It's not just the big companies IMHO - it's also the medium level companies that are overpricing products and 'services' that don't provide much value. I've been through this with a bunch of .Net tool vendors recently and it's very interesting to follow how some of these companies work.
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>Software certainly has value but a lot of these companies are obviously not providing the value that they're charging.
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>For the large vendors this means upgrades that don't provide features that are really needed - incremental changes that really should be free updates for a product that you paid big bucks for.
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>The upgrade cycle is killing this business in the eyes of consumers (both end user and corporate/business). I'm sure of it. However, this should be a good thing for software developers in that respect because custom solutions are a one time investment (even if it's a big one).
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>>As for VFP and its software development prospects. I can say that I've been amazed at the number of small shops with very profitable niche market applications out there. Most of these folks don't seem to visit the UT or other sites, except when they specifically need something.
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>>In my discussions with these niche market shops, I'm hearing more of them talk about pressure to move parts of their apps to the web because the small to medium sized companies they deal with are beginning to see the benefits of web or WAN enabled applications, not necessarily 100% web based, however.
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>>The small to medium sized market, IMO, is looking for pre-built solutions and most could care less what the solution is built with.
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>I agree. Microsoft has really missed the boat in this market with .Net. So have most other vendors. Everybody's shooting for the Enterprise market nowadays, and that's where there's currently no money to invest in software development. How ironic, huh?
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>IMHO VFP is actually a great fit for the small to medium level at least at the desktop end of it. .Net at this point is not a viable solution for shrink wrap vertical software... I've explored this myself with a couple of apps I'm working on and my end of the day resolution is that .Net makes this too painful at the moment. Not because it can't be done, but because it's too difficult to push Sql Server/MSDE installation at a Mom and Pop shop.
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>VFP has and will continue to fit the bill for many of those things simply because it is a lightweight and more importantly self-contained package that distributes easily and performs more effectively even in that space...