Hi John,

If I did not misunderstand Whil's statement, he is not dropping the Fox books, he just is not going to add any new titles. There is a big difference!

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>Instead of trying to twist one's mind into a pretzel of rationalizations I take Whil's statements at face value. The VFP market is shrinking, thus, he can no longer sell as many VFP books as he could four years ago.
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>Understand that Steve has always had a different viewpoint. In other words, Steve for along time, debated and disagreed on the point that the Fox market is shrinking and generally worse off than other I/T markets. I doubt seriously that Steve would do an about face on that point now.
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>What is also interesting is that Steve never challenged Whil on the whole VFP/Linux issue - or the Linux issue itself. This cannot be said of .NET - where Steve not only slammed the technology, but slammed the people. And yet now, after Whil has made this decision, Steve not only slammed Whil, he slammed him hard. For Steve to say that poor sales are due to the website and not general market conditions is absurd and completely misses the point.
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>IMO, if Whil commissioned 9.0 books, they would sell. The unit cost on these VFPs book is small. Look at the book about the goings on at Fox Software (Fox Tales) that Whil published. At 200+ pages, and at only a 9.95 price, do you think that book cost less to produce? That right there tells you the unit cost is $5 or less. Remember that Whil charged 49.95 for the Whats new in VFP 8. My guess is that after costs, there is still $40 on the table. I'll be generous and say that the authors got 30% of the take. That leave $28 per copy on the table. This for a book that essentially highlights what is covered in the what's new section of the help file. Assuming 2K copies sold, that likely represents 40-56K of profit for Whil. Given the mindshare that HW books had - and I do believe Whil enjoyed a good deal of customer loyalty, I think these numbers are realistic in terms of number of copies sold. Start multiplying by the number of books published and given the #'s - nobody should be shedding
> a tear for Whil here.
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>In the end, I think Whil decided it was best to move away from Fox and concentrate on the Linux Market. Who is to say he is making a bad business decision here? Hopefully, those who saw Whil has being the patron saint of Fox Developers will take time to reflect that when it is all said and done, it is about business. And...as soon as it is perceived to not be in the ones best business interest - you get dropped.