Amount of work vs. team size

[DaveS]

kind of like renewing Xojo each year?

[npalardy]

I tell my clients NOT to do that
Some listen
Some dont
Its their choice

[fredhupman]

@npalardy

I doubt Geoff has a pension but has invested his earnings in stocks & such act he could retire on

My point is Geoff is of an age when one is adverse to gambling with retirement plans.

As for your suspicions it leans harder & harder to #2
While I’m sure Geoff would like to see #1 happen REAL/Xojo has, I’ve been told by others, been roughly the same size since for a very long time - this predates my tenure at REAL/Xojo
So I really int know what might have spurred its growth to its current size - I truly suspect having a Mac & Windows version was it

It was far easier to grow a tech company through the 1990s and up to the Global Financial Crisis. From what you say I would guess the product reached peak momentum near the end of Real Basic. I don’t think there is much mystery to the lack of growth since. Geoff is really good at raising barriers to entry and providing loyal customers with reasons to leave.

And, again from what I’ve been told, other things intended to spur growth haven’t made significant alterations in that. Web apparently didnt. iOS apparently didnt. Cloud apparently didnt.

Cloud is only ever going to be a value-add peripheral. They missed the boat with iOS and Android and probably with ARM64 too. Web could have been a source of meaningful growth and still could be.

I honestly believe they are at the same point Apple was when Jobs finally decided to hire Scully.
They have tried things to grow and dont know how to go from where they are to 10x revenue.

Doing the same old same old rather is what leads me to believe #2 is the right answer

When Jobs hired Sculley Apple had only been in business for 5 years. Xojo Inc is in a very different place in the market lifecycle. Jobs’ problem was how to maintain the momentum and grow faster in a market that was emerging. From what you say Geoff’s problem is how to avoid stagnation becoming a terminal decline? Raising prices at this stage is probably not one of the possible answers.

[Karen]

@fredhupman

From what you say I would guess the product reached peak momentum near the end of Real Basic

It was from that time on that I slowly became less and and less happy with Xojo.

-Karen

[thorstenstueker]

@fredhupman

When Jobs hired Sculley Apple had only been in business for 5 years. Xojo Inc is in a very different place in the market lifecycle. Jobs’ problem was how to maintain the momentum and grow faster in a market that was emerging. From what you say Geoff’s problem is how to avoid stagnation becoming a terminal decline? Raising prices at this stage is probably not one of the possible answers.

Exactly. Jobs was in a market which was in a growing situation with nearly no alternatives for the customers. That wasn’t so hard to do.

Xojo is in a market where you’ll find many successful alternatives and that makes it really hard to do. even if some speaking always about “native”. There is a train, the name of that train is web and the wagons are named material and so on. There is no chance to say: we are always native. While there is no need to be.

Tale Java: with the flatlaf look and feel, material look and feel and many others. Tho old time of metal design are gone long time ago before a decade. And the same is with others.

Speaking about it I realize that the most successful apps are not native at all, beginning with discord. So where is the need for native? I can’s get it.

And at that moment the only thing Xojo is good in is gone. While this is the market situation at the moment, growing is nearly impossible at least not for a Basic language which is structured like Xojo.

All of the top 10 languages like C, C++, Java, Python, C#, go, rust, typescript, javascript have one thing together: they are open source. That makes it clear what the programmers want: an open world. While there, in that open world, they can search for an annoying Bug. Placing a Pull request and that’s it. Su Bugs can be fixed faster. That’s possible for all of them.

So I can’t even understand how people believe that Xojo is an upcoming language. It is a language of the old world. Like Visual Basic. They have no real future. And we all know that. They could not even have while nobody wants to write Basic where writing C++, Objective C, Swift, Java, Python and go are so fast to learn.

And the tools costing parts of it. With Netbeans and IntelliJ you could have Java and C++ for free, sorry, please add eclipse to it (not mine from the beginning of it). So you can write Apps for Windows, MacOs, Linux, IOS, Android and the Web with no upfront costs. And less trouble.

The people which are hanging now are the ones which need to get their code compiled and the ones which do not want to learn another language. And this will also be enough at least for the next years for Xojo to exist.