Well I lasted about two months after trying to leave Xojo behind. But its a like a car crash, you just can’t help but look. I’ve been popping on there every now and again to see what’s going on and damn they are fortunate that I wasn’t responding to some of the threads. Should I go back and dig up some of the old stuff, locking old threads eyyyy, can’t unlock them now eyyyy, who knew that would happen…
After the technical debt thread I just couldn’t resist taking this piece of marketing and putting a real world commentary on it. The jugs of cool aid must be overflowing, the timing on it all is just impeccable as always and Anthony getting first dibs on the “Xojo actually has a published page” is just the icing on the cake.
I’ll pop it up as a pdf or the forum formatting nukes all the comments which is half the fun, all the comments are either my opinion, factually correct from my point of view and/or can be backed up with feedback tickets.
Enjoy
Posted here as I didn’t want to give them the pleasure of taking it down.
Aye, its written for “citizen devs” (their target market) who are putting their toes into a new job for small companies that don’t know any better and its just unbelievable cringe.
For in-house Desktop apps that help with workflow at small companies I think Xojo is a decent choice…
In that situation it is either a “citizen Dev” creating the app or doing the work much more slowly manually. For that a polished “modern” UI takes a back seat to getting the work done efficiently.
-Karen
But because of job prospects probably not the best one for most professional coders.
If that dev needs to come on site to integrate, I’m not sure its of any help, the company is then tied to that dev, if they fall out with the dev or the dev moves on or price gouges them due to lock in/xojo dev rarity then all that work/money spent on that project is essentially gone as the odds on there being another dev within 100 miles that uses Xojo is pretty slim.
I was talking about a “citizen Developer” that works there already…
I have been doing that kind of stuff on every job I have had since the mid 80s. Obviously not with Xojo all that time, but with RB/Xojo almost exclusively for the last 20 years.
(One project i had to modify an existing LabView app and created REALBasic App that LabView calls to compile and report data from a home made R&D instrument a physicist in the company put together, after he left the company… I replaced his command line fortran code with a GUI RB app and gave it more functionality/user friendliness )
BTW I’m a Chemist (as in graduate Degree in Chemistry - not a Pharmacist)
Ah right yes, if a company is lucky enough to have someone in house that can tinker with xojo then its a definite help, sorry I thought you were talking about b2b stuff.
Actually that graph is the worldwide share for 2020. Keep up, Ivan.
For 2021 (from the Statista website) Windows is down to 76%. MacOS and ChromeOS are growing strongly, macOS mainly due to the M1, ChromeOS mainly due to the cash-strapped education market. I think it’s fair to say macOS is attacking Windows at the top end, ChromeOS at the bottom end.
And I loved it! Most of those remarks were the thoughts I (and probably a lot of others) had while reading it. Of course this is just the normal Xojo marketing mambo jambo, quickly thrown together and utterly useless for the ones conducting the due diligence.
In fact, if this was used to ‘sell’ Xojo to a big company (this is hypothetical as I doubt anyone shows any interest in it), it may hurt more than help their case.
A conversation could go like this:
‘Hundreds of thousands of users, you say…’
‘Why isn’t that represented in your numbers?’
‘Ah, I see your mistakes!’
‘You can not just add up ALL the licenses you EVER sold in those 25 years and say that is your CURRENT number of users.’
‘And moreover, we notice most of them are recurring sales due to your subscription model, forced upon them because of all the bugs in your software.’
‘If we fix those calculation mistakes, we are now indeed more in the correct ballpark of tens of thousands of users.’
‘I think we can put up the first red flag…’
That was priceless … we miss you on TOF; if nothing else just to give a few heartburns here and there by just calling out facts to the Koolaid Drinkers (sorry; MVPs).
I’m retired, caring for my Mum after my father passed away suddenly. I have zero dependency on xojo other than its more fun bug hunting than doing a crossword puzzle every day, at least the brain power I spend on that goes into helping others (xojo users) instead of the shredder. I took a step back from it after coming to loggerheads with xojo staff when someone dropped some internal company info on me to try and defend their actions.
I’m waiting on the full release of maui as I was heavily into web, .net and telerik in my previous previous life (yes 2x, 1x was a different story for another day) at which point I’ll probably just move on (famous last words, car crash tv etc.).
I am hoping that once the CEO and VP of Software are replaced (in the hopefully not so distant future), Apple will put attention on building reliable and exciting products again, rather than ARPU.
… that Windows, Linux, Mac market share are decreasing, ChromeOS barely wobbles, but “unknown” is growing massively … yeah, right. Are “unknown” all those Hackintoshes?
And macOS has a 15.87% worldwide market share? I wish.
I like my Mac, and I saw those statistics when I fact checked to reply to Ivan - but I would not have posted those. StatCounter bases its numbers on web usage which isn’t exactly accurate (it is about as inaccurate as you can get if you ignore “guessing”) so I wouldn’t rely on those.
Seems the M1 Macs have passed you by? The Apple Watch with EKG? The Apple Watch alone is a Fortune 500 company - as is the App Store, the iPad, the iPhone, the Air buds, and probably soon the AirTags - , so Cook must be doing SOMETHING right. And if they have a blood sugar sensor in the iWatch 7 then watch the sales go through the roof.
When macOS X came out I told everyone to buy Apple shares (at $6.50 at the time) as Apple had a winner on their hands (unfortunately I couldn’t buy any as my Government wanted my student loan paid back pronto). That’s how I feel about the Apple Silicon.
I’m not worried about Apple, I’m worried about Xojo.
Cook has made the SHAREHOLDERS a lot of money - you should know that. And a lot of people have a nice retirement fund thanks to Cook.
If people wouldn’t think it’s worth paying for Apple’s products then they wouldn’t buy it. Compare that to Microsoft: Windows phone? Zune? Vista? Then renaming a bug fix update to Windows 7 and selling it at full price because Vista had such a bad reputation? Then the disaster called Windows 8? And how much money did Balmer get?
Would I wish Macs were cheaper? Sure. I don’t have much money, so I buy mine second-hand and use them for a long time. But I don’t begrudge Cook getting rich when he did pretty well and had Apple growing at a phenomenal rate.
The one thing I would say he should have acted sooner is stopping Ivy from his obsessive focus on thinness and monochrome. But then Ivy was anointed design guru by Jobs himself. He did good work, but then he overdid it. So now Apple is getting back to MagSafe and additional ports, so I’m pleased with that.
As for the changing software landscape and the problems they cause you: I very much doubt you can lay that at Cooks feet - he doesn’t have the expertise - so why do you? Shouldn’t you complain about Phil Schiller or Greg Federighi???
