Updates about the FileMaker Developer Subscription

There may not be an increase in engineers for FileMaker. There is a whole separate team for Claris Connect. I am not uncertain. :laughing:

That's what I'm hearing, too. However that team is made up of people who were transferred from working on FM. Same for Cloud and for this next gen thing.

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It's very possible a couple were. But I've seen the picture of the team, and know some of them personally. And at least one of them came from our own dev community.

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I saw those pics too and I know a lot of those engineers from FM: DAPI, QA, Cloud. I guess the proof will be in what is on the FM roadmap vs Cloud, Connect and next generation. Building a whole new product that can (eventually) replace FM is huge undertaking for a team that is the same size as it was 3 years ago.

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Why do you think the 3rd product is meant to replace FileMaker? From the description of what I saw, it's a Bento-like product that combines the app-flow idea of Connect with pre-built functionality.

Sounds like an interesting product, but by far, not a replacement for FileMaker. Also, their investment in building web-authoring doesn't fit with that idea.

2 reasons I think it is a long-term replacement: 1. it's called "next gen" - maybe it's mis-branded, but that tells me the current gen (FM) will be replaced. 2. I'm hearing it is their attempt to build a serious enterprise grade no-code competitor to products like Power Apps and Lightning - not a low-end Bento type product at all (although it builds on some of its ease-of-use).

It will be interesting to see what the future brings.

Here's evidence of a regional difference. Vendors from overseas tend to ignore that:
Born in the USA: German-speaking users fail to take up SAP's acquired business apps

Agreed. From a business perspective though, a "service" can't sustain a customer base that doesn't provide a constant stream of revenue. That happens 1 of 3 ways. It is either new sales to new clients, renewal/upgrade fees, subscription fees.

How that happens is going to depend on the business and industry. If customers only purchase something 1x every 10 years, coming up with 10 years worth of new clients to keep the lights on is rare. It also makes it very difficult to provide continual development. At the same time, I do feel there are several companies that have gotten greedy. We are seeing something similar with the market grab of Streaming services in the US. I know too many people that have all of them, and are paying equal to, or more than their previous cable bill that they fought so hard to get away from.

The vast majority of these customers has SW maintenance contracts and also gets billed on 'transactions'. What they don't want is being pushed to platforms that do not suit their needs and they cannot deal with too-fast version cycles and buggy releases.
While they are clearly positive about the platform in general, they don't like it when the vendor tries to make decisions for their business.

I have a few thoughts:
Fully understand the sentiment. I don't really disagree with you. The nice part about how this is setup, is that you have 2 years to test and upgrade.

Maintenance IS a subscription. The perpetual nature of the license is what I assume your clients like. I'm with you there.

I don't think anyone is trying to make decisions about your client's business. Claris made a decision about their business. Now all of us make decisions about our business. That natural, and normal. One of the major pieces I've run into over the years, is the failure to analyze the cost of not keeping current. There is definitely a cost to that. It could be losing the "upgrade/maintenance" discount, the need to update all hardware at once, having to test several version worth of changes, etc. Spreading those "costs" out over time can be cheaper financially, and in effort expended.

It is not about not paying for SW. It is about being pushed to the cloud without any choice left, because the vendor cuts off on-site support. It is about compliance and reliability.
Price comes last, if the vendor is not too greedy.

Fortunately this hasn't, and isn't, happening with FileMaker.