With the amount of RAM it takes and the time for Xojo to launch, I’d not call it a great solution.
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it ain’t a great solution after all… 
So sad…
Yes Giulio will be suspended when and if he does not take care to follow their wishes. Xojo has this tendency since years. Otherwise there would not so many people banned from the forum. Ahh, no. Not banned. But suspended for 1000 years from their forum. Like me, Hal, Norman, Dave and others. That exactly IS their behavior with persons writing stuffs which are not in theirline of thinking. For them it IS very important to drop down every form of critics. They want to have all the time a silent marketing-improving “community” forum. Is that a community? No. A community drives itself. It is not driven by an authority but it is by self the authority. Their forum is driven by XoJo, inc. and not by any community. So the company decides as last instance who will be kicked out and who not, which threads will be deleted and which not and what can be written their and what not. You are even not allowed to write about THIS forum here on their “community”-forum. That’s the sad truths.
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The original point was that Xojo – shortly before the CEO’s retirement – seems to be making a targeted push to collect money. The fact that posts on this topic are being silently deleted only confirms for me that this assessment may not be far off.
What really strikes me: In Germany, the U.S. is often seen as a country where people have the freedom to say what they think – even more so than here. Xojo’s behavior doesn’t match that image at all. I’ve never seen another company act like this.
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No question. Only thing I am warning is that this forum is more a support edge customers helping customers than a community forum. This you may find here. The approach of Xojo to save spending much time for support sisn’t bad at all for them. The customers are supporting their entire community for free. Even the MVP users doing that. There is no question which Idea is behind. But they act with it like it is more than support only. They should have named it Xojo Support Forum to state clearly what it is. Not a community driven forum but a vendor driven one.
I saw also many companies acting like that in their own forums. At the end in the most cases it was not good at all to do that. But Xojo has no other chance on the other side. They have a really small team and on the other side there are at least over 900 pro users and around 20000 registered users. That makes it complex to support when you have no support guys on your board to do that job. They are a company with around 12 employees. That is damned small to support, develop and administer a company with a product like Xojo.
And by the way. 900 Pro and not all of them are paying. The Rest: users nobody has an Idea which ones are still users. So let me guess 10 k users paying 500. Would be an income of 5 Million dollars. The ten people around costing 1 million. So he has a big rest. But he also has to pay his investors. So at the end I believe that is not so much money as you are expecting.
Purely in terms of structure, the Xojo forum is de facto a community - because Xojo deliberately set it up that way.
The very existence of an Off-Topic section proves that it’s not just a pure support forum.
And let’s not forget: the only reason Xojo is still around today is because of an incredibly committed community.
I’ve often said that I’ve spent a huge amount of my own lifetime working voluntarily for Xojo.
Here are just a few examples:
A good friend of mine reported a serious security issue in the current web framework to Xojo months ago. As far as I know, nobody has shown any interest in fixing it.
I’ve personally worked through and reported countless bugs - and most of them were simply ignored.
And how many questions on the forum are answered by other users, rather than by Xojo staff?
Xojo very deliberately built this community. And after all these years, a lot of frustration has built up. That pressure will eventually be released - that’s natural.
Just today I spent about 10 minutes trying the Android framework (something I’ve waited for forever, and something I could really use), but absolutely nothing works.
Even in the debugger, most variables show up as Nil even when they shouldn’t.
Sure, if you’re into digital self-harm, you might be able to build a simple app with it. But in its current form, it’s clearly alpha-level - nothing more.
And when you finally realize there’s no plugin support at all, it becomes functionally useless.
I have no idea how many hours were poured into this framework, but it probably needs ten times that amount of work before anyone should dare charge money for it.
Yes, Xojo is being kept alive - barely - but they don’t even provide the bare minimum needed to stay relevant.
Meanwhile, they’ve been announcing features (some of them years ago) that still haven’t materialized.
For years, “Android is coming soon” was a running joke among my dev friends - most of whom use other tools - and they’d mock me for still believing in it.
And really, how can you possibly have confidence that the things already promised will actually arrive this decade?
There are also many features that are clearly long overdue and haven’t even been announced.
It feels like the world is moving faster than Xojo is walking. At the end of every day, they seem to have fallen further behind than they were in the morning.
The community has developed countless workarounds - because that’s the only way to get things done.
And yet Xojo boasts about how powerful their product is because of what you can do with it - if you apply all the workarounds.
Honestly, they should be ashamed that these workarounds are necessary in the first place.
Without the community, they wouldn’t still be here.
So to summarize: Xojo intentionally built a community, they can only survive because of this community, and now they’re treating that very community like the enemy. That’s quite something.
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No idea what you’re referring to, but personally, I haven’t believed for a long time that Xojo is still making much money. I’m actually quite impressed that they apparently earn significantly more than I would have guessed.
In my opinion, they could be making a lot more (as countless other companies have successfully shown) if they finally made Xojo fundamentally free. But that train has pretty much left the station a long time ago.
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At the end it is always a question if the machine is working or not. If they would not make the money they need they would die imediately. I don’t think and believe that somebody will invest fresh money into it. But what ever we believe or think: they increased the prices for the users willing to get more money from it. They stopped the lights for one platform one os products. And that probably while not that many people are buying this products. But at the end we will see when it ends up. Geoff Perlman is in the right age to retire. But when he will do that: nobody knows. So we can still wait and the users having the time at least to learn another platform and stay tuned that it can end from one second to the other.
We all do not know what will go on. XoJo might be more successful or not. It might disappear from one day to the other. We all having no Idea about that fact. The only thing we will have to suffer starting from that moment: there will not be any licensing server so Xojo ends then abrupt.
From an article in times magazine he is 61, plenty of time… 
Tim Cook is 64.
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That may be so, but that’s their problem.
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I suppose it depends on if people are more sensitive to the cost or not
With the dropping of LITE and the significant price increase these sorts of users might face its plausible
And there was always a significant contingent of such users even when the LITE license existed
Let me say that I believe your calculations about revenue are too generous
I doubt they make 5 million annually
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Same here. I don’t think it’s in that ballpark.
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Oh yes, I doubt that too. But it would be the situation with 10k paying customers which they don’t have anymore. Many people are registered in forum but never wrote any message.
Non-posting in the forum isnt really a criteria for “do they use the software or not”
Membership on their forum isnt really either since its not a requirement to have a forum account info order to use the software
Outsiders really dont have any direct measures of “active user base”
Only secondary indicators
Like the activity level on the forums
It used to be way more active than it is now
Thats a function of the user base size - a direct indicator ? I dont honestly know but its certainly correlated
There will be meating the million if even. But that’s what is coming out as maximum potential. I guess from the 900 pro users 300 left which are really paying. And the hope that the light users will buy 500 bucks platform
That they have lost many users is something you can see in their forum use. It was much more before. They have less traffic than 2018. It was becoming less since then. I guess that is one dundamental reason to increase the pro prices while they need the money. And I can even understand that. Why? While they need the money to exist. The big money catcher moment if already gone. There is no chance to collect several millions for retirement. Would be interesting if. On the other side I believe that Geoff has his money already what he needs for his retirement. But with 61? It is too early to retire in this age.
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900 is, the highest I would expect there to be based on the forum user lists
I suspect its substantially lower than that since I’m still listed on their “Pro” listing but I havent held such a license myself for several years
There are many who havent logged into the forums in 5+ years who I would suspect are likely not current as well
Cant say how many non-pro users there are