SNIP
>
>Can I suggest another reason why DBF died? Because there's no money to make with it. I mean I buy VFP and that's it. MS makes no money after that. I do as many apps as I please and MS receives nothing from that.

Well, not quite. They surely do not make nearly as much money as they would from SQL Server solutions, but they at least get the Windows OS sale and probably a MS Word or Office suite sale. And, much more important now than 5 years ago, they keep LINUX out of the shop.
>
>So the solution to this economic mess. Trash the DBF model as fast and as often as possible and push client-server processing. The result. MS sells client-server licenses. Oh yeah I almost forgot. MSDE is free. Is it really?
>

This surely has been the "strategy", and may still be. But one hopes that the LINUX fear and some realization that there are hundreds of thousands of small shops contributing license fees to MS is now taken into account.
Of course all those non-Microsoft marketeers (we have several here) would not be a party to that part of the equation.