VFP: Google to buy Visual FoxPro

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Originally I was going to post this on April 1 next year, but in the end I decided I couldn’t wait that long…
 
A few of us were chatting around the coffee machine at work the other day discussing what would happen if Google bought Visual FoxPro from Microsoft. It’s an interesting idea and one that would probably please the developers who think Microsoft doesn’t support the product (I’m not one of them).
 
Google would pick up a great product, (perhaps change its name to FoxProogle), release it to everyone for free, win over the anti-Microsoft crowd, no doubt building in some search API stuff along the way. Over night you’d see the press talking up a storm about how incredibly easy to use this ‘new’ product is compared to those complex development environments (!), how lightning fast its data engine is, how stable and mature, how well it hooked into SQL Server, the list goes on…
 
It’d be an exciting turn in the history of FoxPro.
 
Being free, many would assume it must be some kind of ‘open source initiative’ and embrace it for that reason alone (joke).
 
After that Google would buy West Wind Web Connection and between the two products they’d have the desktop and web development toolset covered.
 
Google could have hosted VFP accounts (eg just add it to your GMail account) and Google desktop extensions that hooked right into your VFP IDE. Every mum, dad, student and would-be developer around the world would be using Fox to write simple desktop and web apps, pointing to their GFox data store.
 
No doubt you can think of a million other things that Google could do.
 
Anyway, back to reality…
 
 

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By Craig Bailey

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