The Effects of MS's Actions (Posting: Robert Jennings)

A posting from this thread succinctly details the repercussions of MS's actions regarding VFP:

It may be fine for a programmer who goes from company to company to pick up lots of languages and write software in them (Which is fine) but my problem is that I have applications that I have out in the Market, we have over a thousand sites/ships using our software.

Prior to 2000 the company had software written in Clipper running in DOS.
VFP was the natural progression to provide the software on the Windows Platform. (yes a rewrite was required from the ground up) Saying that, it took 2 years to Migrate 1 application from Clipper to VFP.

We have had 9 years since the first VFP code was written. We have 6 Products that have progressed immensely since 1998. We have libraries of functions that work providing the meat of data manipulation and the interface presenting the data to the user. Many of the systems have been modified to meet user requirements.

Suffice to say, that I don't think that there has been a month gone by when the software hasn't been worked on to provide a customer modification or upgrades. There are 3 full time developers working on this software. I would say that 21 Man Years are invested into our software in VFP.

Granted, the software does need overhauling, made to be more oop, separate the Interface from the Data and make it work with a SQL server (any flavour) (we are still using VFP Tables!) Rewriting in VFP would be much faster as a lot of code can be copied over. We could have created the separate layers and we would have gone to version 2 of our software without a problem (well, I'm sure there would have been a couple but not too big!)

Now lets look at what Microsoft have done.
Driven the nail in the Coffin of VFP. They will not sell it, the will not Open Source it. The language, DBMS et al will go. At some point and they can't confirm when, their operating systems will not support the VFP runtime. Yes granted, it may be 2020 before that happens, but I'm astounded that there is not an upgrade path. If they rolled VFP into .NET then fantastic, I should imagine that we could have ported our applications.

Now lets look what I face.
Move all my applications over to another Language e.g. Dabo, .NET (any flavour), Python etc etc etc.
This is going to mean that I have to stop the Modifications and Upgrades to my applications while I (and the rest of the team) re-write the applications (6 of them) from the ground up. This is going to cost my company at least £200,000 ($400,000) for every Year it takes to re-write (Wages / Lost potential earnings in Modifications & Upgrades). I think it will take 3 of us at least 3 years to re-write all 6 modules. 9 MAN YEARS if we are flying.

The new software will not have all the modifications for clients who will one day have to move over to the New application, then there is going to be a backlash from them as I'm going to have to charge them to modify the software to do exactly what they want.

We are a small company, because of Microsoft actions our profitability is going to take a big hit. Our customers are going to see a slowdown in our reaction times (which at the moment is lightning) and they will face a bill to upgrade once we have re-coded. Companies are going to have less confidence in our products because they know that Microsoft is stopping support for VFP in 2015. If we had a rough date by which time VFP will no longer work on the VFP platform at least we could reassure customers slightly.

If we go over to .NET will Microsoft Kill that at some point?

Can Microsoft be more specific when they will pull the Plug on VFP running on Windows Operating Systems?