Saw this webinar announced in my LinkedIn feed:
Xojo are putting on a webinar aimed at WinDev users looking to migrate. Just 5 days after I launched a campaign on Google doing the same thing after a flurry of new users of Objo came from their community (which is lovely).
Can’t help but feel someone at Xojo is watching Objo closely!
…And Buoy… and they should. The days of Xojo’s “dominance” are over and now users have viable alternatives without having to pay $1000+ a year.
Muhaha “dominance” YMMD 
definitely!! when I saw the email.. that is what I thought…
“by afraid.. be very afraid”
They need a technical response, not just a marketing response. Although in fairness to them, they are countering your marketing move.
If I were you, and you were more mischievous than both of us probably are put together, I’d sign up for that webinar under a pseudonym, attend via VPN, and nicely ask the most uncomfortable possible questions.
“I notice you have a pretty long list of open bugs, when do you plan to fix them?”
“What is your average time from reporting a bug to its resolution”? Compared to, oh, say, Objo?
“How are your paid license sales trending lately?”
“How do I know I won’t meet the same fate with Xojo as I did with WinDev?”
Of course you’d be muted after the first question, but still. It’s tempting.
I would be lying if I said I hadn’t considered that but I will be pragmatic and professional. Objo will live or die on its merits, polish and commitment to its community.
Yeah those fantasies never work out in real life and really, the only thing that actually matters is delivering the goods – which you are. Thank you for that!
All this while the devoted Xojo community anxiously awaits the first production release (that is to say not some beta dabbling) of DBKit 
Yeah, pretty sure DBKit will never have an official production release.
I’d add this question"Geoff, you’re already looking to the sunset of your career, what’s about the future of Xojo after your demise in lets say 4-5 years? Will Xojo end up like PowerBasic?"
Well there are several good and bad possibilities to approach such a question. For instance:
We are internally preparing good staff for this position and changed the organisational structure for decision making to deal with sudden absent of important management positions. These measures are in detail a,b,c …
Or another good answer would be:
We have prepared our codebase and set up a legal procedual framework, that will open source everything under GPL/MIT license on the same day.
And of course there are bad or worse answers like:
We have a succession plan.
Gimme a break. What Xojo plans to do is none of our business until it happens. Microsoft, Apple and Google don’t disclose that unless they’re trying to make a marketing statement of some sort.
The idea that appeals most to me as a user of a product like this is along this line:
“A foundation has been established and funded with life insurance to open source the product upon my death or disability. The foundation has a clear mission to promote the product and coordinate ongoing maintenance and development, and will receive a modest percentage of product revenue after my death, which will be shared according to my wishes with my surviving immediate family.”
The foundation then appoints some top users to its operation. Probably modestly compensated and pure direction roles that could be done remotely.
All of this easier said than done and lacks some details (probably for instance should specify the license to be used and whether the repository is public or invitation-only for actual developers or if the contributors are just company employees or those the foundation might hire to replace them as needed, etc). There has been enough open source projects that collective experiences can be studied, e.g.:
The other alternative is to continue as a for-profit, private-source enterprise with clear mission statement and succession plan, but that is probably a path that feels more uncertain to users and is subject to deteriorating technical or product leadership / focus in ways that users can’t influence or self-advocate around. A foundation between users and heirs provides an entity that has the product’s well being front of mind so that it is not simply a source for the heirs to harvest value from or sell to some soulless corporation – it is an entity whose long term health and stability is important both to users and to heirs.
Of course, when the existing leadership and their product is not inspiring confidence and the product is faltering in terms of quality, users are screwed in advance anyway. All of this assumes something valued by a vibrant user community and worth saving and advancing and building on, not something laced with significant amounts of false starts and bad architectural decisions.
I believe they have an internal candidate already selected to take over should the need arise
But that is JUST my belief
I have no proof or evidence that this is the case
So open sourcing the project isn’t in the cards
Oh this isn’t something I think they would undertake in a million years. It’s more to make it a “thunk thought” for the competition, and more in the spirit of how I’d hope that someone other than Xojo would approach this issue. Not a priority of the moment, but something to consider.
It is of course entirely within an owner’s rights to take the route of keeping the private company functioning as a private / proprietary source entity and can be accomplished over time through the hiring and cultivation of excellent technical and management staff, good contingency planning, etc. That’s not inherently a bad or evil choice. As a user I just feel some path to open or semi-open source feels safer as an antidote to the possibility that some future leader would just decide to play the unrestrained extractive capitalist. In that situation the worst case scenario should ideally for me as a user be an open source fork with a separate team if I disagreed with the company direction in a world where the founder is dead or otherwise unable to steer the ship anymore.
I realize of course that this is somewhat idealistic, and even open source projects have their own ways of running themselves into the ground.
Of course, nobody needs to disclose any contingency plans. Normal operating companies and all public companies have organisational structures, foundations or escrow service partners in place to deal with this. Smaller companies w/o, will cease to exist, esp. when they are built around a single dictatoric autoritian CEO.
So do I trust Geoff in this? Nope, he is that kind of leader, which cannot accept somebody next to him.
Then there is the other side of this coin, where there user base invokes their own plan (as many of us have already done), and move to another enviroment that will be solvent for a considerable period of time
Ultimately none of this matters, of course, if “another environment” isn’t itself viable / sustainable either. First, Objo and Buoy both have to sail past breakeven.
Also, it is arguably unrealistic to expect more than, say, a 10 to 20 year window of opportunity to use a given platform, at which point it might be rational for the company behind it to re-architect something entirely new that fits whatever the technical environment has morphed into – just as Microsoft released the .NET platform around 2002 as the way forward from Win32, or Python made quite a lot of breaking changes with 3.0, etc. One can look at the lifespan of Borland, Delphi, FoxPro, Visual Basic … from heyday to final demise I’ll bet they average 15 years.
My own feeling is that in an ideal world, ANY piece of software deserves heavy rework or even a rewrite every 20 years or so. To address technical debt, including changes on the ground that the original authors couldn’t have possibly anticipated.
So there’s an argument that we should just enjoy our favorite platform(s) while we can and understand they not only won’t, but can’t, last forever.
It’s just that in over 40 years in this craft I have seen a lot come and go and the platforms, products and tools that hit my personal sweet spot can produce actual mourning of a sort in me when they die, more often than not from some stupid decision made by an empty suit who has zero regard for the users. I have mentioned FoxPro in this regard before: extraordinary user community, attentive and capable vendor, but his retirement plan was to sell to the highest bidder, where his brainchild died of “not invented here syndrome” as a rounding error on Microsoft’s balance sheet. The core technologies live on in Sql Server and elsewhere, the bones picked clean. I think it deserved a better fate than that.
But then … most people deserve better, as well. And most don’t get it. It’s life.
I’m 69, so what would become of my users is more front and center for me. I am making decisions as I build out a system for what is almost certainly my final client that more often asks the question, “what can I do to make this easier for my successor to understand” and “how can I tune this pipeline so that if I had a stroke today, the system would mostly work for a few months without me?” My client already owns the code I wrote for them so there’s no need to put it in escrow. But if I owned the code, I likely would take that step.
Your priorities shift past a certain age, at least assuming a basic level of self-awareness and humility, caring for your customers, and acceptance of your own mortality.