I spotted the article below and FileMaker gets a minor mention.
I’ve had disagreements with (now) Claris employees about the creep of big players like SAP into the small business market after the big boys market becomes saturated. Those I have spoken to disagreed with me and were of the opinion that these big players will have no interest in the SME (FileMaker) market and there will be nothing to worry about.
The no code products I’ve looked at are too expensive and have little interest in our market. However, I’m not sure this will remain the case.
Next frontier in Microsoft, Google, Amazon cloud battle is over a world without code
Let me tell you a story that took place a long time ago. That was when Windows 3.x was the graphical environment of choice (ahem). I was working with a very small consulting firm, we were at most 7 or 8, in the microcomputer world. At the time large consulting firms were working in the mainframe world.
Then came in IBM OS/2. We were fast to adopt OS/2 and were quite busy with that. At the time, large companies were moving from Mainframe to microcomputers. The large consulting firms were completely ignorant of graphical environments - I remember working on a common project with one of these, the guys could not differentiate between check boxes and radio buttons .
But as big companies were embracing microcomputers, the big consulting firms understood they need to adopt to the new reality. After a few years we we out. These big firms were able to develop micro-computing projects for a price much higher than ours . . . but they were attracting large customers.
Interesting looking through both AppSheet and UnQork - I hadn't heard of either of them, which I guess either shows how out of touch I am, or how fast the market is moving!
AppSheet's pricing looks pretty darn impressive ( 5 or 10 USD /user/mth), UnQork's pricing isn't shown, which presumably means it's very high.
One thing that all of these platforms lack though, in my opinion, is a large enough developer user base to support the kind of shared knowledge that grows out of forums and shared articles etc. This is where FileMaker continues to shine - 9 times out of 10 someone has already achieved something similar to what I want, and it's just a case of bolting all the bits together.
That space will keep getting more crowded. The ocean should be large enough for everyone. That said, some will die out in the process. The fact big players push "their own" initiative does not guarantee longevity: Google had its own horse in that race (App Maker) and killed it after buying AppSheet, inviting their users to migrate over to App Sheet (I'm sure their customers were pleased to hear that). Microsoft has its own list of failures. I don't know much about Amazon.
The hard part will be for customers to choose a platform as the offering is ever broadening. Connectivity and being able to own your code + data, self hosting options, should score big points in that game, but may not trump ease of use.
As a result, a lot of untrained people are going to be in the driver seat. Usually that means the guardrails will have to be pretty high and sturdy (read: limiting you in what you can do).
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