OT: If I were to list what I've done with filePro & vent how I feel about filePro

[Fairlight]

On Mon, Mar 26, 2018 at 09:37:42PM -0400, Jose Lerebours via Filepro-list thus spoke:
> Mark,
> 
> You make, very elegantly I most say, my point ... in its current
> state, I agree, it has no chance (lets see what next release packs
> within ...) but I truly believe that if they had focused on one OS
> and at its infancy (the OS') they could have captured a sizable
> market worldwide.

Yeah, but we're into 'woulda, coulda, shoulda' territory.  There's nothing
for it at this point, without a major financial and talent infusion.

> I am not suggesting they do this now but rather that they should had
> done it years ago when RedHat was taking free OS and making $$$
> because, lots of businesses and enthusiastic techies were willing
> (and still are) to pay for stable apps and a "go to" team.

Those were the days.  Nowadays, people are bailing on RH because...well,
why get RH support when you already know the platform well enough to handle
CentOS on your own?  You know how many times RH has ever fixed a problem
I've found and reported?  Zero.  They actually left a version of Perl
-broken- (via their own introduced bug) for about 3-5 years of RHEL4, I
think it was.  It was 3 or 4.  Bear in mind that Perl itself, by design, is
never supposed to crash, but RH made it crash regularly, on either sort(),
int(), or return().  They never tracked it down and fixed it.  I used to
have to paralllel install my own fresh roll of it without the bug.

> All that said, some in this list have predicted the "death" of
> filePro and sucker keeps punching his way to the next round (or
> year).

Somehow it has more lives than a litter of kittens.  Hell, I predicted
Apple's demise for a decade running, and they now have more fluid capital
than the US Government.  Granted, they did it by branching out to
different products, and -not- on the imagined strength of the overpriced,
under-specced Mac platform.  They did it on the glossiness of the iPod,
iPhone, and iPad.

Now there's an object lesson in what actually gets you market share.  Apple
products are technically inferior in -many- ways.  Samsung phone quality
blows away Apple's.  PCs come better specced than Macs, at a fraction of
the cost.  You can make a lot of money if you dumb something down to the
lowest common denominator, slap on a pound of gloss, and give it mass
market appeal.  Substantially, it's mediocre at best, but it sells like
hotcakes...at least until you get greedy enough to push the price point
farther than the audience is willing to pay.

filePro had -some- things going for it on the tech side, but past a certain
point, it's the antithesis of sexy mass-marketability.

Actually, I was just looking into dBase Pro 11 some more, as well as
the history of dBase in general.  I finally found where they say the
applications you build run on -freely available- runtimes.  $500, develop
your apps, and apparently the users don't need to pay licensing to dBase.
And it's essentially got all the strengths of filePro, from the feature
list, a -huge- amount of things fP doesn't and will likely never have
(gestures for Windows??!), and costs the meager sum of $499 for the full
version.  That's ungodly cheap, comparatively.  And the sheer amount of
storage back-ends with which it can talk...  It's pretty much what I've
been advocating filePro become for years.

If I were going to buy into -anything- in this arena -now-, it would be
either dBase Plus, or FileMaker Pro (ooh...now an Apple subsidiary...ugh).
FileMaker Pro is iOS ready, too, and has the same de-coupling, but not
quite as many possible data sources.  Little more pricey then dBase Plus,
though.  But...Apple, so all is explained with a magic wave of the hands. :)

m->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.