Ted,

Your well presented post has me thinking the following:

VFP is a great tool kit to develop a variety of small but strategic

applications. I believe the key to being successful with it is to not

bite off more than the product can comfortably chew, and to have

prospective customers (a) perform acceptance testing before buying into

the product, and (b) not making promises that the product can sustain

any/all changes to the customer's environment.

I left the highly stable IBM world after many years for one reason and

one reason only: PC's and MS made it possible to get into the software

business without an up-front million dollar investment. I spent hundreds

to get in - and a million since - but at least the (illusion of?) the

barrier-to-entry was crossed.

What I think gives us different views on the VFP/software world on our

table is that I'm focusing exclusively on a particular application that

I'm telling prospective customers will work in certain environments, and

you're solving very difficult after-the-fact customer problems. We both

have tough roads to how, but I think your lot is another level more

difficult than mine, owing to what MS has done to the PC world.

I could ramble on, but I'll jump to the bottom line: I think folks like

yourself would be much better served by going over to the very complex

but highly stable IBM world then staying with MS or putting together

pieces of different technologies. Linux, I think, is the portal.

Bill

> >

> > For every person on this planet planning or executing a complete

> > rewrite of a working line of business VFP system (not a developer

> > tool) into .NET/J2EE/anything, I want to ask a simple question:

> >

> > "What were the business reason(s) for doing so?"

> >

>

> 1. Scale. Client wanted to move to gigabytes of data, and

> their internal programming staff and consultants they brought

> in could not develop a satisfactory app. Client invested

> millions in DotNet and SQL Server, and went bankrupt. Remants

> of the company are back to megabytes and back to VFP.