I misread my own chart. Your number for November is right on the line. Today’s number should be around 143000.
I suspect the invoice numbering system will change soon… 
-karen
2 Likes
Here is my data:
| Invoice # | Date |
|---|---|
| # 139670 | November 29th, 2021 |
| # 137020 | May 7th, 2021 |
| # 130797 | December 2nd, 2019 |
| # 128445 | May 27th, 2019 |
| # 111568 | December 6th, 2014 |
| # 104704 | March 17th, 2013 |
| # 104520 | March 2nd, 2013 |
| # 104368 | February 18th, 2013 |
| # 94545 | January 28th, 2011 |
| # 84449 | April 13th, 2009 |
| # 73925 | June 29th, 2007 |
| # 73924 | June 29th, 2007 |
| # 68462 | July 5th, 2006 |
| # 68439 | July 4th, 2006 |
| # 62032 | May 27th, 2005 |
| # 62021 | May 26th, 2005 |
| # 54216 | February 23rd, 2004 |
| # 49924 | April 18th, 2003 |
| # 44297 | July 17th, 2002 |
| # 40975 | January 10th, 2002 |
| # 26869 | August 20th, 2001 |
| # 25260 | April 22nd, 2001 |
UUIDs!
1 Like
WOW!!
Your data in RED, my last purchase on green.
Some could say it is a success to be here 25 years later, some others could say, that s a very mediocre growth.
WAIT, this is NOT growth, this are cumulative sales. So, Sales have being in decline since 2018 
(Must be the trolls, not API2 or web2 
)
So this means like 4,000 or less active licences each year
What I think everyone is missing is two fold
- we talking (in some cases) multiple license sales PER invoice
- “assuming” that the users who bought a license in the past, renewed every year
case in point… Karen has purchase 20ish licenses, but she is only ONE user, and the invoice in Nov 2021 is the only one that should “count” as it is the only one active.
< sarcasm value=1000% >
yeah trolls caused the sales to flatten out
100%
not like there could be ANY other contributing factors
< /sarcasm >
definitely - its hard to equate “licenses” to users
maybe an invoice is multiple license & many users
maybe its just one license
but do we count all my license from pre-2008 as “active” - I’d would say no
And again there are many of those but I am 1 user
At the MOST generous 1 license = 1 user
What’s hard to know is how many of those are active users
I have my own guesstimates
Assuming it is the Pros that bought multiple licenses, the flattening seems to coincide with the “Pros no longer being Xojo’s target market” …
There is a lot of wild goose guessing in this thread. There seem a lot of very disappointed people here. Only Xojo inc. can know how many users they have.
I do not see any constructive value in this thread. Nevertheless, when this kind of conversation makes you feel better, please do it because it is better for your health.
In the months I have been browsing this forum, I can see one constant with many members. Which are the pain and disappointment those bans caused by the people inflicted. In this way, the behaviour of Xojo inc. banning people for a lifetime is evenly WRONG. The best way to solve conflicts, even in public, is to communicate and find the middle way. Banning or closing threads should be a last resort when everything else fails. And if Xojo inc. has to ban someone, do it for one week the first time and when that does not help, then ban for a lifetime. However, in the end, it is Xojo inc. their forum, and they do what they please. Xojo inc. is the “master” of the Xojo universe.
Luckily the “IfNotNil” forum exists where people in all democratic freedom can raise their opinions and help each other. Because of the democratic freedom and respect, I also like this forum so much.
Be aware that positive thoughts are so much stronger than negative ones. Vent your disappointment in the beginning but end with positivity/constructivity. You will see, you feel even much better!
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As always, perspective matters. You can look at it like people are just bitching and hate everything, you can look at it like people are lost in a xojo free world and now they just have too much time and are rampaging.
There are users who switched radically, but most still have dependencies because switching doesn’t happen quickly. Some dependencies are also called “customers”, so they still have to struggle with Xojo (and the bugs and ugliness).
Finally, the fact that people are getting worked up about Xojo is basically better than not caring anymore, isn’t it? Many are of the opinion that Xojo took a wrong turn at some point and regret that. Wrong turns can happen, but you shouldn’t go full throttle afterwards. And with more and more bugs and more products with fewer developers, it’s also legitimate to ask critical business questions. Some still depend with their businesses on the success or failure of Xojo. Of course, solely Xojo is accountable of their business, but wrong decisions can easily damage your own business and that happened in the past.
Xojo still had unique selling propositions 15 years ago, but those days are long gone and when management doesn’t provide consistent answers, it’s a breeding ground for speculation.
Probably useless and it won’t change anything anymore. But discussion remains important. This is only possible in a place where you can talk freely, even if it means more background noise in such a place.
I didn’t renew my license, just to follow your proposal to close with a positive message.
2 Likes
Fully agree, permanent bans should be a last resort. Xojo’s handling of this is lacking. It is also bad to attack people on a personal level. We are all human beings, and this includes senior management staff of companies.
Bad decisions can be named, exposed and reviewed. Anything else is the antithesis of progress.
Now, the ‘community’ of a vendor is not a democratic body, it is the sole property of the vendor. The vendor handles it and it’s members however they see fit.
If a vendor is wise enough, they know that a very small group of people, or even worse, a single person, cannot know everything in a complex technical system. The wise vendor hauls in external support for getting ideas and selecting the best solutions before implementing things.
If bad solutions are imposed on customers, sales figures will give accurate feedback to the vendor.
My own educated guess is that Xojo has a maximum of 7000 licenses with current update rights.
What actually concerns me is that Xojo seems to be under-staffed for all the work waiting to be done.
Hi Jeannot and Torsten_B,
You both made interesting observations and remarks. Once chosen a proprietary development environment, it isn’t easy any longer to switch once you make commercial applications. Like Xojo, they use a proprietary format which is not compatible with other environments. That is the biggest disadvantage with applications like Xojo.
I also share your concerns about the small Xojo development team, which is very motivated but struggles with the Xojo project. It is very worrying people like Greg O’Lone are leaving. It is also correct that the unique selling point for Xojo being multi-platform is long gone. Open Source applications like Python are filling the gap which gains in popularity.
I do not have a crystal ball to oversee the future, and despite the fact I am not using it anymore, I am concerned about the future of Xojo like both of you and many others here. Xojo inc. should elevate those bans and listen to what people have to say, especially the critical experienced voices.
On the other hand, we also should understand that we have to respect the limitations of a small company like Xojo inc and that not everything which is being proposed can make it true.
I strongly believe in teamwork which can move mountains. In Botswana, I have my own saying to mostly black people I am working with: “When black and white work together, they are stronger than ever!”. This is true, and we can also extend it to our daily lives and projects.
The Law of Attraction… always working!
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At the end of last year, I decided to drop the platform I used for development for over a decade because of too many bad design decisions made by the vendor and continued disregard of the existing expert developer customers.
Looking for another cross-platform IDE I am currently learning to work with Xojo (having a desktop license).
Xojo recently made good and bad decisions: moving to GitLab for issue handling and selecting SPHINX for version-capable documentation are good moves. Selecting TypeSense as the documentation search engine is a bad move, that could have been avoided.
In small or large organisations, it all comes down to the decision making process. I’ve been working many years as a customer project engineer in aeronautics, an industry that has been stung in the past by the outcomes of bad design decisions. It is a regulated industry and after catastrophic outcomes, thorough investigations about the when, how and why decisions where taken are carried out. Most times it comes down to the decision-making processes. Making design decisions in complex technical environments aren’t an easy job. The decision-making process must account for this. If such a process follows an organisation’s line of hierarchy instead of levels of expertise, bad decisions with bad outcomes are almost guaranteed.
The most important thing I learned as a customer project engineer:
when you have an existing product customers rely on, and you want to improve that product, ask your customers before implementing anything. Customers will tell you if your great idea is great - or not.
No.
The “you belong to me and have to do what I tell you” attitude has been relegated to the dustbin and is no longer acceptable in relationships (eg domineering or even abusive husbands), politics (at least in democracies), companies (be it with employees or customers), the military, or twitter / Facebook / forums.
Xojo has gone down a dark path of hype, unfulfilled promises, and outright lies and instead of reflecting and considering if it really has the moral high ground (morals allegedly being very important to Geoff with his kids) has doubled down and banned dissenting users, deleted critical posts, and even altered posts.
In short: it is out of touch with how a modern company needs to treat its customers and needs to be, and doubles down on being a dinosaur.
Geoff might not think so, but “soft power” is important. How a company is perceived has a massive impact on their bottom line. Trust depends on image.
And Xojo has increasingly projected a totalitarian, abusive, manipulative, and untrustworthy image.
It is therefore unsurprising that individuals and companies have become increasingly disturbed by Xojo’s actions and direction and started moving away from it not just because of the mess that Xojo has become (bugs, half-baked feature releases), but also because of its image and reputation (eg who would think they can trust what a company says after seeing what happened).
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In order to make your
No.
pertinent and binding, you’d have to change law governing legal entities in the USA, Germany and a host of other countries.
The “you belong to me and have to do what I tell you” attitude has been relegated to the dustbin and is no longer acceptable in relationships (eg domineering or even abusive husbands), politics (at least in democracies), companies (be it with employees or customers), the military, or twitter / Facebook / forums.
What is acceptable at society level is not necessarily identical to what law defines. Law tends to follow developments, not leading them.
I still do not believe that personal attacks can improve things at organisation level.
Have a nice weekend.
Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all solution in the industry, and every solution always has its pros and cons. This is a truism and everyone has to decide for themselves which tools to use. Even with large companies offering solutions, you can never be sure how long a platform will survive, whether it is open-source or a proprietary solution.
But what is rather rare these days is that bugs are not admitted or belittled. It’s also unfavourable if a bug is fixed at some point and then “all of a sudden” reappears. And when something like that happens, there are usually quick(!) patch releases. This happens very rarely with Xojo.
It is also rather unusual to treat and punish the leading users like children. Actually, you listen to the different opinions and work on a common roadmap.
I gave up on fruitful 2-way communication.
Xojo has the peculiarity that you always have to switch to the latest version for bug fixes. That might make good business sense for the Inc. (in theory), but forgets what that means for customers. Often you just can’t switch to the latest release from here to now (time, customer not willing to sponsor that move, dependencies on plugins, and(!) changes in the API etc.) just to get the bug fixed because too much has changed. And with bugs that are several years old, such a change is often an impossibility.
I’m sure enough users would be willing to pay a fee to have their particular version patched just because they don’t want or can’t switch completely in a given project. But of course, this is a business decision that Xojo has to make. The Inc. has made that decision indeed: No, we won’t do it.
An LTS version would obviously be the simplest solution for all parties, but it won’t happen.
Well, in this case you just let the company with its “numerous” developers continue to work on trivial things and to live their big dream, but you may have to revise your own decision and investment. I did that. It hurts, it was expensive but it was the right thing to do.
BTW, I’m not banned, I just don’t have the desire or time to get involved in TOF and it also feels to me like you’re banned yourself, when your own friends are banned. I do appreciate moderation. It is important to stay focused in an support forum, but bans and censorship don’t help a dime, that’s why INN exists.
Xojo handles that like it. All possible ways for Solutions are not used. Temporary ban, read only Access for testers etc. Xojo policy is: getting rid of exactly that people. Why? I can only imagine so that is not counting. But I know exactly why I got banned. And that was exactly not while I was writing against forum rules. Following to the rules I was writing that I am protesting against the fact that for all users Web 1.0 is deprecated. Mr. Perlman wrote about it that they will maintain when there are showstoppers. I wrote about the showstoppers. But they where not doing anything. The other way around: they told after that they will never touch it again and people shall use Web 2.0. Still not ready, still not working. But hey, people get banned.
And so I guess that I can say for me: I will work further and live further. But I will not be silent about this practiced harassment of the needs of the customers.
So we are not working for being the attraction. Especially that I really don’t need. And I guess Norman, Dave and Hal also do not need it.
Looking on your text I realize: I am really happy with Java. Xojo isn’t the best Idea in my opinion while you do not know that your invest of time for Development will be alive tomorrow morning. That broke my neck once. It will never again. For Web I use Vaadin, Swing for Desktop and CodenameOne for mobile. And guess what: it costs not even one Dollar to use. That’s Java. And the world of Java. One thing you even not can do with Xojo.
What I want to say with that: it isn’t so that Xojo is the only one running on all platforms. C# is not really. But Java is definitely. Also Go. Only for example. There is more than this only one.
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I would disagree
The product is their property
The community that grows up around it is something the vendor can cultivate
But they down “own” the community any more than a band owns its fans, or a car company owns its enthusiasts
Xojo would do well to do this
But they dont
Geoff expressed it to me face to face at one time when they moved from the old multi window set up on the Mac, which didnt work well on windows, to the single window form
He literally told me “We know better than you do what you want”
That sentiment may not have been said again but its definitely apparent
When was the last time an idea was floated on the tester channel BEFORE a beta rolled out ?
Now they do have they exceeding tiny MVP group to do this.
Why couldnt they roll it out in a mockup (say figma or something) ahead of implementation ?
They could. They just dont.
Thats a managerial decision
They have no legal ownership of the members of the community
IF however you mean the forums then yes they own and operate the forums
But the forums are not the entire community.
They often say they have lots of users that never use the forums (or feedback for that matter)
Unfortunately since they never do bug fix only releases this may bring new features and NEW bugs in those new features.
Or regressions.
its often a crap shoot to update or not
And then there is/was the Web 1 to Web 2 switch
It wasnt even a realistic option to “port” existing apps - they are/were complete rewrites (I have a client that has at least 3 large apps in this state)
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yep, and I do understand why they had to basically start from scratch with Web2 but that’s not an excuse to not finally fix some long known challenges with Web1. Especially as they SAID there will me a) a migration path b) we will fix those bugs in Web 2 but they didn’t.
If they do believe that this is an architecture approach people can build a reliable business on, they are wrong. And if resources are missing, well it is all about priorities. I am aware of at least one product which could easily be discontinued. But I won’t neither tell them how to run their business, nor how to save it.
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