Certain companies have developed a great talent for alienating their customers with marketing tricks. Xojo Inc is a great example we all know too well.
Here’s another one I’d like to share with you:
Claris published a new version on FileMaker this week. In their forum’s product announcement this piece can be found:
over 500 improvements were made — many of them were first identified by Claris Community members in the Report a product issue topic.
Product issues are reported bugs. The marketing piece above now calls bug fixes ‘improvement’.
A member of the community dared to ask what these 500 fixes actually are. Here’s question and answer:
The release notes only cover a few fixes which the vendor deems necessary to inform their customers about.
In short the story goes like
Hey customer, we have a new version with 500 improvements (fixes). That’s so great, go and buy it!
That’s nice, I am a developer and need to know which 500 bugs got fixed
We’ve let you know some of the fixes in the release notes. The ones we want you to know. The rest of those 500 fixes we are boasting about is none of your business.
They’ve lost many customers and developers over the last years and the exodus goes on. I don’t get it that even when customers and developers leave in numbers they don’t change. Anyone has an explanation?
P.S. if the guy continued to ask for an answer he’d get lambasted by the MVPs there.
I was quite surprised that after a decade of ‘we don’t discuss our stuff with developers, get used to it’ they try to find out what went wrong. We told them in 2013 and 2014 at developer conferences in Germany and Switzerland…
Will Xojo ever get to that point (without going bust before)?
In a way those sort of questions make you think something twigged them to even ask
Was it a loss of renewals/revenue ?
Constant complaints ?
Or what ?
That would be very interesting to know - but I doubt we would ever
It really does mean something when Claris openly asks for this kind of feedback. Many developers have tried to convey their message for years, in vain. Now, the flow of suggestions and comments is well below 60 posts in the two threads together, no more posts coming in now. It is eerily silent. Many, many developers have left the community.
Same thing will happen to Xojo if they won’t change course.
today i had to change a few checkboxes to toggleSwitches in JavaFX. I was prepard to a major disaster, but nope. Basically they both only give back true or false. I changed my UI in the visual designer, renamed the variables through change in one place (refactoring by the IDE) => done.
If I had not used cb as a prefix and ts as the prefix for toggleSwitches it would have been enough to just change the controlType … but hey why following a smart approach, if you can complicate your life with the green software
I’d go back to FileMaker as my tool of choice if they’d fix the pricing. I just want FileMaker Server Advanced with unlimited Web Direct seats.
I don’t think I’d go back to Xojo even if most of the bugs were fixed. It’s just not cross platform anymore and the abstractions are significantly weaker now.
But with FileMaker you can write one ‘app’ for all targets other than dealing with a Mobile Screen dimensions.
