It is what it is. The more pre-fabricated it offers, the less flexible or extensible it is. FM is a good prototyping tool and delivers an operational v1 in a very short time. This works as long as there are only a few clients to connect and performance demands are low.
For anything else, select another tool.
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It has some pretension. Claris’ marketing is always to much, overselling. The whole thing went the same way as Xojo: dumb it down and make it appealing to those who have no clue what a relational database or an algorithm is, drop seasoned developers in the process. It resulted in a shift of customers away from FM to other products (custom and off the shelf). Recently we saw a change in attitude, reopening the conversation with developers. Let’s see when Xojo starts realising that they are on the wrong path.
Back when FileMaker jumped the shark, I sent this to Tim Cook. Nothing changed…
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I understand that tools like FM exist, but in this day and age with prof. SaaS solutions from salesforce and SAP (Business One), Oracle, etc. it amazes me.
These companies are now bringing solutions to end users of smaller businesses at low cost that were previously only available to enterprise customers.
Surprisingly, it is not more expensive than FM, often even cheaper, or free for read-only users, or users with limited rights.
Nothing actually changed until very recently. My educated guess is that many developers have jumped ship and many customers dropped the platform because of a lack of developers and no clear path to where the platform is heading to - and every increasing prices. This impacts sales.
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Once you step away from the standard SME offerings, SalesForce & co become expensive, too. Often, these small companies have very specific processes that can’t be easily built into these standard offerings.
SAP and the likes are way to complex and expensive for these companies. I watched a 300+ employees company going down SAP hell.
Yes but Filemaker? I mean that is really not the best way. kay a good way to loose money. I was once writing Software for FM users with Java Swing. They were happy like hell cause they could not do that things with Filemaker. And so I do not understand until today why Filemaker Devs were running to Xojo. They could run to Java or any alternative. but they ran to buy Xojo. At the end they had the same.
I just realized you’re on FMSoup too… Yeah. They thru devs a couple bone, but nothing much of consequence.
Amazing how FM / Xojo / others take so long to hear what their customers are saying. Once they acknowledge it, it’s generally too late.
Many full time FM developers are field experts turned developers. Xojo looks like a good alternative when considering multi-platform development. Once you understand how Xojo’s ‘x-plat’ works and that company is managed, it is already time to move on again. It takes a closer look in order to come to conclusions.
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if they even acknowledge or even better: if they even realize. The entire Point of this Companies is that they follow a policy which is not always clearly to see. While there are CEO’s, CTO’s, Marketing Directors and so on. At the end there is a mixture of people deciding what will happen to the platform. This we have with the Xojo inc and with the filemaker people. It is no difference.
And also you have no chance for influence. What ever you do they follow their fixed plan. Inside the fixed plan it is normal that people complaining. But when you for example as a CEO believe you are right you will not step back from your decision for or against a Platform.
The other way around. You will ignore that while for you your reality is fact and truths. Not the thinking and believing of the customers nor of your employees. And especially not your former employees. What they think and which opinion for anything they ever have can only be wrong. If that would not be so, it would mean you are wrong. And that is killing all business chances. That is named tunnel vision. And this tunnel Vision will keep them far away from truths. Not while they are believing that they do wring and they think that they are not speaking truths but while they believe they are right with what ever they do.
In the last 36 years I had to learn from many people like them that there is only one way: having a good and healthy distance from it. When and if you can’t generate that distance it will start to destroy you. Nobody needs that. Especially me. And also you. There is nothing you can do to change anything or to move anything.
At the end It is so: there are two ways: they have enough money to get outa there after it crashed. Then they exist further. Or they have not. Then they end up in a Chapter eleven in USA of insolvency in Europe. There is no other way.
And so users should think about and that really good. Not to pay maintenance makes it less possible that they can come out. If you are not paying maintenance it is okay. But you should already have started to learn another platform to get your Job done like Java or C++. Because you are Part of the Problem which grows bigger and bigger.
In my Case: I changed to Java. But what will you do when it will end from one day to the other. When the Build Servers are off you will have licenses until the next Hard Disk is coming. or the next computer. Latest then your Sourcecode is useless. Completely. While not compilable.
The entire point for me using Java is: IDE and all stuff I need for Production of Software is free Software. No licenses from anybody needed. No need for any license fees. While using OpebJDK no need for fees for Java JDK and JRE. But with Xojo? Ending of that company is ending of new Releases and ending of the ability to compile whole there is no license Server anymore.
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Agreed. I only worked with large SAP systems for multinationals enterprises, but even there some projects failed miserably. Some customers really believe that if you don’t have a specification, you’ll just buy a golden bullet and everything will be fine 
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That’s why my favorite first saying as CTO was always “technology doesn’t matter”. However, you don’t just make friends with it, many just look at you in horror.
I last worked with Salesforce 12 years ago (at that time already in many areas “low code”). Anyway, that was impressive. However, it was also fascinating that nobody really wanted to be satisfied with the standard, but everyone was playing around with the system to customize and optimize it. If you’re not careful, you’ll quickly create a monster that can’t be maintained and will slowly eat you up, as with any system that a company doesn’t introduce in a structured way.
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Yes, the marketing works. The forum also has the Inc. well under control, which also helps. The IDE looks inviting and the first steps are successful and fast.
Especially if you’re “lucky” enough to move in after a stable release, things can go well for quite a while before you encounter a massive problem.
My company (27 people!) decided to go with an ERP (we went with Infor Styline with enhancements) and I am bit concerned about experiencing something similar!
-Karen
All ERPs come with a set of features and can be customised to a certain extend. It’s when the implementation tries to counter the system’s basic architecture that things go wrong. First, know your processes, improve them if necessary. Then select the right ERP and don’t try to make it work in a way it is not designed for.
Keep a critical eye on the ‘enhancements’.
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I am highly sceptical of the new product they are working on. It doesn’t stir much interest among developers. Still in an early state of development, it repeats fundamental shortcomings of FileMaker. Will they change course? I doubt it but let’s see.
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That’s right, when SAP projects hit the wall, it was almost always because the customers didn’t want to accept that SAP brought along standard processes.
Instead of easily adapting one’s own processes to the standard processes, arrogant attempts were always made to adapt the standard processes to one’s own. It will go wrong with a probability bordering on certain.
Mainly because it was thought that the standard was set by SAP, that SAP implemented best practice and was ignored. Especially in highly regulated areas such as finance, HR and purchasing, there is little reason to believe that you have better processes than the competition. One of the advantages of SAP, Oracle, IBM, salesforce is that they implement legal changes extremely quickly. If you have now “optimized” your system in such a way that this update has no effect or even generates errors, then the outcry is great. It’s not the fault of the ERP manufacturer, but unfortunately your own stupidity is to blame 
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It’s a pity that there are unfortunately also many “consultants” who earn their money by badmouthing standard processes and allowing customers to stumble into the “optimization” trap. That’s why I left this business in disgust after 7 years.
Or SAP may not be the right tool. Even SAP’s own consults fall into that trap. I remember DHL had to abandon a migration to SAP a few years ago, effectively binning more than EUR 365 000 000 (yeah, that’s a number) in the process. The project was run jointly by SAP and IBM consultants.
Correction: the DHL fail cost EUR 365 000 000, the LIDL SAP fail had cost EUR 500 000 000)
and me, still at that time as an external and only at the end as the killer machine stopping this non sense :-). Yes project “Dashboard” was a non-starter. But that would have happened to any ERP system. Trying to consolidate 30 countries in the FI area (with heterogeneous solutions in place and different legal requirements) into one ERP system without abolishing the other systems cannot even work on the whiteboard.
Lidl, do you mean the “Kaufland” project? Of course I was involved in that one too 
- I could share a few “funny” stories on that one. Changing the underlying database and hoping for miracles w/o changing the rest of the chaos inside the ERP would be one
But I agree that none of the ERP systems do fit to everyone. Back to due diligence, and making your home work first. Never a good idea to define your requirements only after the implementation…
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One of our Customers uses SAP and from what we can see there are times where the system seems to wag the dog!
Now compared to us the are a much larger company with a lot of sales and significancy higher margins.
For a small company like us agility matters. Flexibility AND speed are very important.
-Karen
Yes, I’m not a SAP salesperson - I’m only talking about the tools that I know, and that’s SAP (and salesforce a bit) in the ERP environment. And with SAP it also makes a difference which variant you use. SAP/4 Hana is a different beast than SAP Business One, which was designed specifically for SMBs. But even then it doesn’t have to fit for your business. But first try it out-of-the-box before customising it too deeply.
Regarding SAP, I will never forget my first implementation of SAP Retail in Russia. We proudly ran a demo to the customers of how the system fully automatically calculates the sales tax to be paid after one day of trading, across all tills and markets.
Casual answer from the big boss: I don’t understand, we negotiated a flat rate with the state.
Well, then no ERP system will help anymore.
Incidentally, there was also an answer to why they were introducing SAP at all. So why introduce a German software that is known to meet every legal requirement:
Our foreign investors force us to use this nonsense!
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