Would'nt this be a nice marketing pitch

"Not only Military institutions use it they desperately need it for the protection of US military all over the world." And then MS could add other stuff to show to businesses they should use VFP too.

Your point of view makes perfect sense Dragan.


>>>>In fact I'm wondering why is MS even bothering to release VFP9?
>>>
>>>Because it still makes money for the company.
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>>So you're saying that MS makes VFP to make money. Would'nt they make more money with more agressive marketing?
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>It's Friday, and I'm in the mood for some idle guesswork.
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>My hunch is that they think they wouldn't make much more money. They spend as much money on VFP as they find profitable. I mean, look at it - the Fox team is basically less than 20 people, plus add a few overhead, so it's still below 40. It's their hardware (software comes for free - they use only in-house stuff, I'd believe), building, salaries and supporting a few conferences and authoring some content for the website(s).
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>We are doing the rest: sales, help desk/tech support, market research, beta testing, evangelizing... and with that business model, it is profitable, because they still get a decent buck compared to the investment. And an extra benefit is the nice technologies which are tried in (or directly coming from) Fox first.
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>However, if it were mass marketed, the marketing itself would have to cost an order of magnitude more than now; the tech support would have to grow proportionally (if not more), and that's where they expect that throwing more money in that direction is risky. Also, a niche product would suddenly endanger the sales of some other products where money was already shoveled in.
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>So, as long as profit/cost ratio of Fox stays as it is, good, it'll live. As soon as it becomes expensive to develop/market, the ratio may go to hell (or endanger other products), and so may Fox.
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>Another reason why Fox will continue this sort of life (Set Speculate=Still On) is its use in the governmental (all levels) and military institutions. Those are the places where current hype doesn't pass so easily, but long-term commitment and backward compatibility does. And Fox is the only developer's tool coming from Redmond (apart from, maybe, most basic C or Fortran) which can still run 15-year code without much mucking about, so it has a firm base in those places.
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>Set Speculate Off
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>I have no idea now.