Way back when I suggested they start with reproducible bugs from any user
Why those should sit and languish when they fit very nicely with the kinds of reports they ask for (something thats reproducible so we can find the bug quickly)
All by myself I have 100+ reproducible bug reports
I could list them all here
Yeah I saw you mention that somewhere. That’s crazy. And another potential KPI (key performance indicator) metric to get a broad conspectus of Xojo. You could have number of feedback reports, severity of reports, number verified, how long it takes to verify, how long they sit in verify, etc. A dashboard and longitudinal graph could tell you “are things gettin better or worse”
It could be completely automated to give that data. A quick glance by the CEO and others every week would be trivial and could help arrange short term priorities.
But let’s run a thought experiment. What if Xojo is better than it was 2 years ago and all these people are full of shit. It’s all anecdotes and bed wetters. Without KPI’s Geoff has no way to know. He’s relying on an emotional feedback loop and one horrible metric. I saw he posted that the last version had something like 169 bug fixes. But that’s meaningless. What if they added 227 bugs?
At the very least, his ability to defend himself is impaired by the lack of good metrics.
Do I think those things are worth it ? Always did
But the question is whether Xojo does
Metrics like this were one thing that the old Fogbugz system did and did well
It learned how well a given engineer estimated based on estimates and actuals over time so everyone get better at estimating
It tracked all kinds of metrics about submitted reports, time to fix, etc etc
It had built in project planning and lots of other useful things
You could do exactly as you were saying in tracking lots of different metrics & KPI’s
Setting this up with feedback as the basis would take time.
And that is time that someone at Xojo is not working on Android, Web 2, the IDE etc etc etc
Given my experience I know what my guess would be about whether they think its worth investing the time to do this
As someone who has worked at more than one company that folded out from under them, I can tell you that that quote is a most dangerous marketing position.
True, nobody buys a release for bug fixes but if the fixes are not forthcoming the users will soon buy someone else’s new features.
I have actually bought and update of some software for bug fixes - critical ones
Often though it doesnt come to that because the vendor fixe them in such a timely manner
A lot of my thoughts have already been covered, but in case Geoff does actually come read through this whole thread:
I will never use Xojo for any mobile development. The native tools are SO much better than Xojo will ever be.
I will never use Xojo for any web development. The alternatives I already use are SO much better than Xojo will ever be.
I only use Xojo for desktop apps, and my Windows users are the majority of my user base. I have to deliver high-quality Windows apps, or my users will go elsewhere. The lack of any attention to any of the modern windows UI toolkits has been the final straw for me. We are currently in maintenance mode with all our Xojo-produced products, and are actively building new things elsewhere. We’ll continue to pay for a Xojo license for as long as I need to maintain my old projects, but eventually that will stop.
TL;DR: Xojo has spent too many years chasing after new markets / technologies (and delivering half-baked and pretty incomplete versions - always VERY late). Their competitive edge has always been on desktop, but they’ve ignored it for so long that they are losing the edge there, as well.
if memory is correct:
marco had a nice multiuser db based on sqlite
dependable - stable
realsoftware purchased his db and renamed it realserver
realsoftware then stared adding features, example - could now use plugins
christen stared asking what kind of plugins people were interested in for the new version of realserver
word got out people were refusing to use the newer version of realserver due to new bugs
geoff then quickly sold realserver back to marco
marco fixed the known bugs and starting successfully selling as cubeSQL
my opinion:
if marco could fix the bugs - geoff could have had bugs fixed
geoff saw adding features to a known buggy database would not increase sales
so geoff got rid of realserver instead of fixing the bugs
geoff believes, unlike databases, xojo profit will respond better to features than an increased level of bug fixes
like realserver, when geoff believes bugs are bad enough new features will not sustain sales, he will attempt to sell what is left to someone else when you want to guess what someone will do - look at what they already have done
That was a great read, thanks. “We encourage you to upgrade to the latest version, which is in Beta, has no documentation, no migration path, and which we have kindly deprecated in advance for you” - LOL
As far as I know Marco was the author the entire time even when it was sold as REALServer
Yeah, I fell like Marco came on board with the product. Or maybe I’m confusing him with the SQLite plugin guy (his name escapes me). One, or both, of them came on board when Geoff bought their product. It’s been a long time. But speaking of wanting to do everything “in-house” at one time realbasic baked it’s own database. Moving to SQLite was a smart move.
No, it was a realbasic dev that made a SQLite plug-in for RB back when they had their own in-house database. I’ll admit my memory is fuzzy and I’ll accept any better brain to correct me if I’m wrong, but I think Geoff bought the plugin and brought the guy onboard for awhile. I can picture him in my mind but I’m suffering a bout of anomia at present.
