Kevin,

>>About five years ago, more and more people began to notice that clients took a much greater interest in development tools than they did in the 1990's.

About TEN years ago, more and more of my clients began to take a much greater interest in development tools.

For some reason, Powerbuilder was all the rage and FP was increasingly on the "out". My very best customer urged me to move to Powerbuilder and when I declined, they began feeding work to others.

Those Powerbuilder solutions cost a fortune and never made it to "live" status, because the developers simply did not understand the business. Busy clinicians refused to use it.

Since about Y2K, nobody has given a jot what tools I use, apart from competitors... and even they don't slam VFP as much as they used to because customers simply don't seem to care. Many corporate IT people have techno-hype fatigue. When assessing external solutions they just want to be sure it works, uses a decent database, and fits in existing infrastructure.

I've never, ever gained or lost a customer because of choice of development tool.

The "difference" seems to be that you work with customers to create solutions that address their identified need, whereas I develop solutions that address industry problems, independent of any customer. You offer value by creating robust, low-risk, maintainable solutions using mainstream tools; I offer value by leveraging my strong knowledge of my particular arena to keep coming up with solutions for entrenched problems that customers have often relegated to the "too hard" basket.

IME: Choice of tool has very little to do with market perception of my product. In your experience: it apparently has a great deal to do with it.

I'm perfectly comfortable that your experience differs from mine. What disturbs me is when posters assume that curious passers-by are ignorant but otherwise identical to themselves, and desperately in need of a dose of "wake-up call".