Not really. I bought this one those days, I think 1995. Came boxed with printed manuals and CDs.
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Delphi was good but Borland went bust. They went bust because they couldn’t sustain millions of devs at low prices (note the swipe at Microsoft VB in the ad). They quickly switched to a high-priced “come to our platform” model and lost their customers. Legendary stuff of software marketing.
Anyway the ad is from 1995 and not the early 90s and so represents the present dynamic. Interestingly Borland is gone but Xojo (RB) is not. Maybe time to think about that.
Very the opposed. They went bust because it was a huge success, they got rich, and screwed the tool after diversifying the product line, moving to millionaire structures, giving millionaire salaries to the executives, and forgot what gave them all that money. They elevated the prices to sustain all that useless cost and lost the huge and loyal user base.
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They got their millions of devs pre-VB and pre-VC++ Microsoft crunched them on price, as the Delphi ad attests. Most of their base went from C++ to Java. Delphi devs were often x-Borland Pascal.
The point is this kind of product marketing was based on Microsoft’s platform hegemony which in its last gasp Borland tried to break being “the Switzerland of Software”. It’s a very different landscape today.
Nope. MS was a joke near Delphi those days. Borland management killed Borland, not the tool. The management was so bad that Borland started to lose their best compiler engineers unsatisfied, while the management wanted to repeat their success with Delphi with other tools no one would care.
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That’s right. They went into expensive enterprise stuff against MS because MS cut deep into their dev tool margins. Yes Delphi was better than VB and their junkets were more fun than Microsoft’s too. But honestly, Delphi for $99 - how long could that last?
MS helped them hang themselves faster when they poached Anders Hejlsberg in 1996.
Forever? Depends on how you manage it. 99 x 3000000 is $297 million, let’s repeat just 30%+ of this every year and not going to the banks and asking $500mi to get luxury headquarters and pay huge amounts of money to the wrong persons.
Most of their devs were C++/Java not Delphi. Delphi was not cross platform at the time of Borland’s demise. Now it is (but no Web, no ARM & harder to learn). But their professional version has a comparable price to Xojo Pro-plus.
So my argument is that’s what it will take for Xojo Inc to offer the kind of service that seems to be demanded by the OP and others. But are Xojo pro devs prepared to pay that kind of money?
I will not discuss the Xojo business model, I was discussing a case of people doing bad management in the past and losing the correct price tag and losing the user base. A tool I liked, and watched step by step their decline year after year knowing exactly their errors.
That’s a terrible experience. Better to have the tool just cancelled as what happened to me. However I’m not suggesting Xojo Inc. ditching the low price model. It can’t because of all the hobbyists anyway. It’s expanding the other end of their market what I’m talking about.
What other end?
They are typically pro devs which must provide service guarantees to their customers or other stakeholders. They need to tie that back to their tool vendors. For example, a web service may need access to immediate support in case of zero days.
The Xojo user base I noticed is formed by:
Hobbyists
Citizen Devs
BASIC language lovers
Curly-braces blocks haters
Amateur devs
Desktop cross-platform interested mixed level devs
A few Pro devs that like the tool as a RAD tool for small projects
Pros are a small set of the total, they are not the other end, the user base is diverse and fragmented.
I’m a Pro, I would not write a web service with Xojo, Xojo currently does not scale very well.
Can we made a Time shift to the 2020 year, please ?
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We are back since Latest blog post, what goes into Xojo
It can scale by putting a load balancer in front and running multiple instances.
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I feel like I relate to every category in your list, depending on what I’m doing. However the common thread is the vast majority, including many pros like my company, aren’t full time programmers. But what I have been talking about is supporting Xojo-powered businesses which have mission-critical custom or public-facing apps. If you’re in business the IDE and SDK also can be mission-critical to productivity. For such users the support level is as important as new features, maybe more so.
I think part of the problem is people aren’t upgrading hardware as fast as they used to. A lot of support problems used to become obsolete more quickly when they bought a new platform. And personal computing now includes server apps, mobile and IoT.
Meanwhile, open source people introduced the idea of rapid release software, possible because they were mainly not inventing but chasing the tail lights of proprietary systems. And not being on many LAN desktops meant they could use the internet directly for distribution. Yet this reset expectations in user land where most Xojo customers live.
So now we have more hardware types supporting more software versions than ever before. And easy-multiplatform Xojo is positioned at the intersection of all this constant change. Of course pro devs want Xojo Inc. to allow them to fly above all this weather. My company does too. But to deliver that level of support cannot be done on the cheap. I think pro devs must now accept that if Xojo Inc is to offer more than low-cost rapid release tools (e.g. more with pro-plus licences) they will need to pay more for them.
For feedback can only be the beginning of the development cycle.
Since a long time ago, we heard Mac OS X (10) would be the last major version also. Now, they have surprisingly moved to 11.
I don’t trusts advertisements.