Continuing with my earlier post:
As for me, I’m now about halfway through an online C# course I bought, an ambitious course that takes you from the basics to design patterns, multi-threading, SOLID principles, application architecture with separation of concern, optimization, and more. I’m smiling and sometimes chuckling as I practice the tutorials and think, “Damn, this feature is really cool!”, and “Wow, the IDE can do that?”
I guess it all comes down to not only the points I made above, but the fact that I can build stand-alone compiled programs in C# for free, have access to an incredible array of tools for little to no bucks, and have access to a mind-boggling number of support and learning options. With Xojo, if you’re not going to be selling your work to justify it, it’s a fairly hefty price for the Pro license and have a comparatively tiny field for learning and support. Now Geoff himself might rightly say, “Well, we can’t compete with free”, and I agree with that 100%. And I have no hesitation paying for a dev tool that’s worth it to me. But if I’m going to do that, I would hope for a dev tool and support and resources that also makes me go “Wow!”
Now if Geoff were to read this post, his response might be, “You, sir, are a moron.” To which I would raise my glass of beer and reply, “I, sir, will drink to that.” I’ll be the first to admit I’m not a pro. I’m still what you would call a citizen programmer. I wrote VBA code for the companies I worked at, and now I’m writing it for my customers, and they like my work and are happy to pay for it. But with C#, I can start with it and I don’t have to worry about limitations if I want to take it further down the rabbit hole. With Xojo, I’m not so sure. (I suppose the argument could be made that, “Dude, you’re 70. How much longer you think you’ll be around?” I don’t know. But now that I’m doing what I always wanted to do after all these years, I just know I’m having fun with it now.)
Do I hope for Xojo’s demise? Absolutely not. On the contrary, even considering what I can interpret of Xojo’s trajectory, I still hope they can survive and become even more successful. I still check the forum, subscribe to their YouTube channel and X (aka Twitter), and I would certainly consider trying them again if I thought it would be viable for me.
But it seems like it would take a considerable investment to increase the size of their development team to yank much of the wiring and rebuild the IDE, extend the language and framework, build a team to focus on bugs and quality control, and decide who their target audience really is.
But maybe I’m wrong and maybe there’s a method to their strategy. If the pricing structure, support, release cycle, IDE, language and framework can gradually be improved in time, I’d say good for them, and I would again consider it myself.
…or maybe they should just make it open source and charge for support. 