I have seen a similar pattern from 1997 or so. There was a company, COIN Dealership System, that had acquired Convergent Dealership Systems (minnow swallowing a whale deal, never should have been allowed). COIN ran into financial trouble almost immediately. Reynolds & Reynolds ended up buying COIN for pretty much asset value. Initially the customers using COIN equipment (Unisys/Convergent Unix minicomputers) were pleased, and felt they finally had a stable company providing them solutions once again.
Well, the honeymoon ended in 1999 when R&R advised all COIN customers they had to replace their equipment with R&R equipment, or seek a new vendor, as they were not going to be able to (chose not to) alter all the assember programming code on the COIN equipment to handle Y2k. R&R knew they would lose at least 1/2 of the COIN customers they had just acquired, but since the purchase price of COIN was so low they did not really care about the customers who would leave. It was not worth the expense of recoding the assembler based applications for Y2k compliance, and they were out of time anyway. They were going to focus on retaining the onces they could, and provide them the newer solutions, and let the defectors go there own way. It was a business decision, pure and simple, no emotion whatever. In a similar way M$ is not going to fret about those VFPers who end up moving to non-M$ solutions. They will try to capture all they can with .Net, and milk what they can from those who remain "faithful" to M$. They are not gaining as much off VFPers as compared to .NETers when it comes to MS SQL Server sales, so why bother keeping VFP around any longer than they need to? If the abandoning VFPers remain in a Windows environment (like I will for the most part), M$ will still see OS (Client and Server) and Office sales, if nothing else. Then again, I am looking at moving to a Linux Server with VMWare guest OS for clients needing a Server based OS, so M$ will get minimal revenue from my design direction. My loyalty is to my clients, not to any particular company. It is business, pure and simple, no emotion... Gil > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Eugene Vital > Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2007 12:54 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: VFP Open SOurce Push > > > Stephen the Cook wrote: > > Ed Leafe <> wrote: > > > >> On Apr 4, 2007, at 9:07 PM, Stephen the Cook wrote: > >> > >> > >>> There is absolutely no advantage to M$ in opening up it's code base. > >>> None. > >>> > >> And lots of advantages in not doing so. They don't want a growing > >> Fox community. They would like nothing better than for every single > >> Fox developer to abandon it and more to .Net. > >> > >> I've been noticing that whole '7 stages of grief' thing going on > >> here. Seems that many folks are still stuck in the 'denial' phase. > >> > > > Some people take a little longer to realize what is happening. > > > Oh so very true.... kind of like cattle being led off to slaughter? > > > > Stephen Russell > > DBA / .Net Developer > > > > Memphis TN 38115 > > 901.246-0159 > > > > "A good way to judge people is by observing how they treat those who > > can do them absolutely no good." ---Unknown > > > > http://spaces.msn.com/members/srussell/ > > > > > > > > [excessive quoting removed by server] _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
