A once-successful contender in the rapid application development market, FileMaker faces the consequences of 15 years of first neglected, then poisoned developer relations. They wanted to get rid of indie developers and have been very successful in this endeavour:
FileMaker market - growing or shrinking?
Corporate greed seems to be a rather bad strategy consultant.
That is an article from 2024 that looks on projects offered a specific platform.
FileMaker projects may not go there, but I wouldn’t take that as an indicator of a shrinking market.
They got greedy.
Beside the fact that the market will shrink while AI makes good job the tco are really high with it. The most users of Filemaker I know went away from it to other alternatives. The pricing is above an AI package which allows you all platforms. That’s a simple decision.
Oh man, how much of my life have I spent working with FileMaker. Sigh, we’re just getting feckin old people.
I had a stint in the early 2000’s working for a company where the owner’s wife had automated everything in FileMaker. She understood that wouldn’t scale with their ambitious expansion plans so she hired me to move things to a proper DB with .NET apps atop it. She even approved me hiring two full time developers to assist. Two months after they came on board she realized she didn’t have enough cash flow to pay them and a year later when I finished the new system by myself she experienced severe approach avoidance … she realized she was losing control. She understood FileMaker, but she did not understand C# or TSQL. So I got the bum’s rush too.
It helped that their ambitious – one might say, grandiose – expansion plans never materialized. The company’s client base grew about 20% during that whole period. About 10% of what they were hoping for.
I took the work with the full understanding that this would probably happen. I got paid well to do interesting work for about 2 and a half years while the economy finished recovering from the dot com crash. I even came back a few times to automate some other stuff that FileMaker couldn’t interface with … notably, a C-like scripting language for a typesetting system.
It was probably the most cynical thing I ever did, taking money from a client that was their own worst enemy and where ultimately 90% of the work done came to naught. But I got a lot of great war stories out of it.
From my point of view, there was nothing to love about FIleMaker – which, in those days, some people were calling FileBreaker because of its tendency to corrupt itself. I tolerated it because I had to help them hold all the chewing gum and baling wire together while the new system got built. Once they decided to stick with FileMaker after all, I was gone so far as regular work was concerned.