Monday, October 9, 2023
Tags
- move on
- Xojo
Time to move on ... continued
Monday, October 9, 2023 - Sam Rowlands
The second part of this series is actually much harder to write about, the wound is still fresh and there's so much I have to say, it would make a very angry book. Instead, I've tried to summarise it as best as I can.
Xojo
Since 1998, I've built every single Mac app with the Xojo development tool (Aka Real Studio and REALbasic).
Over the last ¾ of a decade, Xojo started ignoring bugs, feature requests and industry trends. New features felt rushed, incomplete and sometimes unusable. Dark mode support and concurrency are two prime examples. Something is clearly wrong.
Xojo had embarked on a multi-year project of "2.0 All The Things™". All Xojo customers must now experience learning a new programming language. Does this new language make Xojo generated apps faster, more stable, less buggy, more capable, more compatible, more secure, more memory efficient, require less resources or less code?
No. In some cases, it does the opposite.
Each step of the way, customers were argued with, dismissed and some insulted. Criticism and suggestions were ignored. Disappointment turned into frustration, frustration became anger and anger led to a projected ⅓ of their customers walking. In a few short years, Xojo turned their most evangelical, enthusiastic, knowledgable, experienced and loyal customers, into enemies.
The entire Xojo universe was negatively impacted. Forums, 3rd Party add-ons, training resources, available sample code and job openings. Each time a valuable resource or work opportunity vanishes, so does some of Xojo's appeal, usefulness and reputation.
Bob Keeyney's post from 2019 sums this up nicely. Bob used to run a Xojo consultancy business and provide training resources for Xojo.
Why did Xojo do this? On March 21st, 2023 Xojo's CEO explained why.
I came up with the idea for API 2 precisely because I believed the API was accumulating cruft.Later followed by
Dana likes there to be data to back up every decision we make regarding product design. In the ideal world I would as well but we don’t live in the ideal world.
On the 4th of October 2023, Xojo announced that Dana is leaving after 17 years. This follows Greg's departure in Feb 2022, he was an engineer there for 11 years.
I've linked to some blogs from others who've made the decision to leave and written about it. Bob, Jeanot Muller.
I should thank Xojo's CEO for forcing me to re-write my apps. As I will be able to deliver apps that save my customer's time, disk space and memory. I should be able to focus more on what my customers want, features that benefit them, instead of broken or incomplete functionality. I feel sad for the community, friends and Xojo employees that I'm leaving behind.
All in all, the more I talk about this, the more I feel that moving on from Xojo is the right thing to do.
Part 1 of my "Moving on" series is here from https://ohanaware.com/blog/2023/09/Time-to-move-on.html