Hi whil,

I fully respect your decision. I can imagine that when the sales stop, you've got to find alternatives. You've had an enormous contribution of educating VFP developers, and therefore I salute.

However, what still bugs me is the following:

When we talk about market, we seem to use different definitions. I imagine you will define that as the market where you can sell your books and conferences. There is no doubt in my mind that market has been shrinking. Of course the 9/11 also had a negative effect on conferences (and not only VFP conferences, i've seen the same trends in other totally unrelated businesses).

As VFP has matured, and each improvement in new releases are not that spectacular as the introduction of OOP in '95, I think I understand the decline. Once people know the foundation of OOP and are familiar with the VFP syntax, Web services, I don't see any reason to buy new books about the same. There are a lot of good VFP books out there already, and many questions a developer has on a particular item is much easier to answer via an online forum like the UT, WIKI, WWWC, or FOXFORUM, etc.

I personally never did buy any VFP book myself, never subscribed to a VFP magazine, never visited a conference, yet I do regard myself as a reasonable VFP developer.

So the question is, how do you measure the VFP market?

Walter,