Kevin,

>>Do you discount the possibility that motives were simply to help, nothing more? Walking into a meeting to start talking 5-year plan, with a .NET consultant in the room...one needs more 'ammunition' than a committment to support a product until 2010.

Presumably your response was intended to be helpful because it forewarned of the sorts of things the dotNET consultant might say? ;-)

But even your example begins to point to alternative explanations why everybody didn't move to dotNET when you did. Many VFP people have absolutely no fear of a dotNET consultant in the room. Why? Because business insight and acuity is not delivered by choice of development tool but by immersion in and familiarity with that business. Many customers care *far* more about industry track record and experience than about connection pooling. Development tools may be so far down the decision tree that the choice is made before it ever gets that far. By way of example, consider that MS Word isn't going to be rewritten in dotNET anytime soon. How many companies do you think are including that in their decisions about word Processor purchases? And why should VFP developers move uncritically to dotNET when even MS itself sees value in the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" school of thought?

>>So I restate the question...why is it viewed as a game?

You want me to answer for somebody else? Wouldn't be difficult... but why does it matter? For better or worse, it won't be happening any more. So we might as well get on with it.