Blockquote
Apple doesn’t give a shit if it continues to lose developers, they’re busy finding new ways to extract revenue from the remaining developers, Xojo doesn’t have that luxury, but still appears to act in the same way.
^^^ This right here is the crux of the matter and it is in turn just a meta-manifestation of a more fundamental problem, which is that corporations are running out of sustainable ways to wring ever more profits from ever fewer actors who have less and less money to part with. Geoff is best understood as a two-bit mini-oligarch presiding over what is to him a semi-passive source of income … he puts (too few) people and (too little) money in one end and waits for profits to come out the other end without any true pride of workmanship or commitment to delighting customers. There’s some vision, but it’s not connected to a system that would translate that vision into much more than incompletely-realized good intentions.
While I have supported enough software in my day to have empathy for how bugs are triaged and how some are very difficult to resolve, it is clear that this situation is not just a matter of a few irritated and/or unreasonable users trying to make the perfect the enemy of the good. I bought my Xojo license with the full understanding that it would not be 100% bug free. There is no such thing. HOWEVER I cannot rationalize the cavalier attitude toward bugs and their impact on users and the risk I’d be exposing myself to if I committed to providing products and services to paying customers. My test case of an internal administrative app for CRUD of database tables is an acceptable risk (sort of); but Xojo, to be anything but a “me too” product has to deliver on at LEAST multi-targeted desktop apps and preferably on mobile and web, and that just isn’t happening even for desktop targets when people are complaining about controls not lining up when designed on one OS and deployed on another, etc. I expected the odd bug here and there, but not to have to futz with conditionals to get things adjusted – that defeats the whole purpose. I could do that with, say, .NET and WinForms.
The result in my case is that in all likelihood I will not continuously (if at all) maintain my Xojo Pro license after the first year, and that is as much a bitter disappointment to me as it OUGHT to be to Xojo. As it was, the only reason I sprang for Pro in the first year was to be able to fully evaluate console / service app production. I did not think either that mobile or web would be past the pioneer stage in the first year, or that I would actually need it in that period anyway.
The graph represents page views, not total users. The users page shows 244 registered users. But still not bad for such a niche subject. Probably just as many as “active” users on TOF (can’t know for sure since they disabled the users page).
I thought we were talking about the proportion of anonymous users.
Crawlers counted in the report are likely to be the well behaved bots, with an honest user agent, that honour indexing directives in the robots file. The anonymous user count will likely include malware bots, with a spoofed user agent, that ignore the robots file.
A question I like to ponder on a Friday. Imagine a bot that perfectly simulates human interaction for dishonest purposes. Is that a good bot or a bad bot?
Does anyone know if Xojo has a reasonable continuity plan in place? i.e. If Geoff gets run over by the proverbial bus this afternoon, what’s the future of Xojo the company?
As Geoff Perlman is CEO and biggest Shareholder I would say: they would have to search a new CEO and the company would run further. One of the good parts of an incorporation is that the company only needs then a new CEO. The rest of the people including administration will still be there I would guess.
Xojo doesnt have a reasonable current plan, so I doubt he has a contingency. His ego won’t let him consider such things…So I expect Xojo to fade away if he passes, if it hasn’t done so before then
From 2008 to 2020 I worked for a startup (successful, thankfully) whose elderly owner had no succession plan. Reading between the lines I think his family was urging him to come up with a plan, and the easy out was that when Giant International MegaCorp offered him an easy $14 million he took the money and ran. He now claims that he didn’t realize all they ever intended was to harvest the data and client base and shut it down, but frankly I think he knew or at least strongly suspected, and didn’t really care. When the acquisition was in due diligence phase (but I was in the dark about it), in early 2020, I was 63 and he openly was musing to me that I was probably about ready to hang up my spurs (I wasn’t) and I thought, that’s an odd thing for him to say. And it was because he knew what was coming and was telling himself things he wanted to believe, that whatever happened to me I’d be fine with it.
Fortunately for me, the new company is so incompetent it can’t figure out how to shut us down without hemorrhaging clients so it mostly leaves me alone to keep the lights on. I’m good at least through next year and into early election year, and probably will be extended year to year as long as I want it. The other two survivors on the IT side of things are predicting at least 2030 before they transition or sunset all our products. I won’t last that long though. At this point if any one of us quits they are in deep doo-doo.
The other possible outcome is exemplified by one of my client’s clients. This is a family-owned company with an over-inflated notion of the value of their product that we wanted to acquire, but they were holding out for fantasy price maybe 10x what they were worth to us. One of the siblings that ran the joint died, their customer base dwindled, they are still to this day running with Sql Server 2000 and client software written in that era that no one knows a thing about and can’t be changed. And they are still holding out for the same fantasy price. In their case, they will end up bankrupt and/or accepting the market’s valuation, like it or not.
So for Xojo I would think it will be one of those outcomes – a bigger competitor will buy them up just to swat the fly, and will create a relatively “easy” upgrade path to their flagship product for users. Or, Xojo will hold out until reality forecloses on them for pennies on the dollar.
I guess there’s a 3rd way, which is for someone with more $ than sense to come in and finance a larger development effort which will at least temporarily inject some life into things. From a user standpoint assuming you like Xojo, that might be the best outcome, but it’s also probably the least likely.
I wish Geoff Perlman a long and healthy live. Now, all humans are mortal (even Roman Emperors where reminded of that at days of triumph).
If a company that small has no communication about contingency, customers are free to take the risk - or not.
Doubt any “larger competitor” even cares that Xojo exists and would not be willing to invest to either maintain their longevity or “swat them”… not worth the time or money.
I see them thinking they are worth 10x their value, and fading away…
With the PROs chased away, the complete lack of jobs for xojo users, the constant changes, the poor quality in the releases, the killing of web 1 wen web2 wast even half baked, etc, etc, etc. This is the less likekly
As long as the current ceo is in charge, I doubt there is someone with so little sense as to risk money like that. There are already stories of bad experiences for investors.
I wish Geoff no ill will or personal misfortune. This is just business. Xojo has no market value for desktop apart from something like PureBasic which also has a Basic dialect and targets multiple desktops. The market for people who want Basic and cross platform desktop is small and shrinking. It could be somewhat resurrected if the same platform would provide reasonably painless and simple mobile and web apps, which clearly isn’t happening especially on Android and Web. That is just the reality.
If I had fully understood the gap between Xojo’s marketing vision and the cross-platform reality on the ground I would have just written my Xojo app in .NET / C# / WPF or maybe even WinForms and I’d at least have more experience with more mainstream tech stack that does the same thing. As it was I got seduced by the hope and promise of Xojo and sadly the reality is far, FAR from that.
Yes that seems most likely to me, too. This feels like leadership that believes its own BS and discounts the consistent messages delivered by market realities.
