Runtime DEPRECATED?

[David Jondreau]

I apologize. I didn't mean it as a challenge. I'm just trying to understand something.

I've heard several runtime developers express the sentiment that deprecating runtimes in future versions of FileMaker is bad for FileMaker. That runtime developers are important to FMI somehow.

Clearly the deprecation is bad for that developer. I get that. And even if it won't actually affect anyone for 2-5 years (time until deprecation + time until OSes become outdated), it's usually hard to face the mortality of something.

I'm not a runtime developer myself so I don't feel the emotional punch.

It's not clear to me why someone would think it is bad for FileMaker itself. As comment mentions, we can only pretend to know what's good for FileMaker. I think it's extremely likely that FMI has actually thought this through, run the numbers, and decided rationally that runtimes aren't worth supporting anymore.

I don't understand why runtime developers say it's a bad decision for FMI. Or why they're an important subset.

 

 

[comment]

​I would assume that anyone running a business has those numbers for himself.

​Apparently we're not talking about the same kind of numbers, and I misunderstood you when you said:

​IIf you think you can pitch a case to FMI that you can prove that your use of the runtime brings them revenue

​Though to me it seems obvious that no single developer can prove such thing, since the entire point of a runtime is that FMI gets no (direct) revenue from it. That's why I thought you meant "your use" in plural.

[Josh Ormond]

If one can show that a developers use/sale of runtimes results in annual licenses of FM from customers who expand to a multi-user solution...FMI is clearly interested in those numbers. And we should be able to provide those numbers.

At least that was my take on it.

[comment]

FMI is clearly interested in those numbers.

​You should explain to David how come you know so clearly what FMI is interested in... :-) And I don't know how one would get those numbers, even as an approximation. Anyway, this is not a direction worth pursuing IMHO. Let FMI run their own business.

[David Jondreau]

comment, Why are you trying to discourage this topic? If you don't want to engage in the conversation, why don't you just unsubscribe from the thread and let people who want to engage in it do so?

[comment]

comment, Why are you trying to discourage this topic? If you don't want to engage in the conversation, why don't you just unsubscribe from the thread and let people who want to engage in it do so?

​I was replying to direct responses to my posts. I could simply ignore them, but I believe it's more polite to respond and explain that **I** am not interested in pursuing this any further. 

[Josh Ormond]

​You should explain to David how come you know so clearly what FMI is interested in... :-) And I don't know how one would get those numbers, even as an approximation. Anyway, this is not a direction worth pursuing IMHO. Let FMI run their own business.

​The one thing I know of every business.  The numbers are what you live and die by. High enough revenue profit numbers mean you are succeeding. Low enough profit numbers ( loss ) mean you are failing...or will eventually run out of funds to continue the business. Unless you change something.

For me, I absolutely let FMI run their business. But they do take in data from the developers to help them make decisions.

I think we are talking about different numbers. I do not know nor do I want to know FMI's numbers. I do know my customers and my own sales. If I did provide a runtime...and sold it to 100 customers, and 25 of them then went on to setup a multi-user solution ( assuming they used me to do it and probably did ), and purchased 250 licenses of FMP... Well I know that FMI is interested in knowing those numbers. I have in fact been asked that question more than once from FMI.

Edited May 15, 2015 by Josh Ormond

[MSPJ]

Well, I think it's time for me bow out of this discussion. I get Josh's point above, but this is completely unrelated to my business model.  My sales of my product do not lead to ANY sales of additional licenses for FMI.  Again - I am not selling to businesses.  Families don't run out and spend hundreds or thousands of dollars after using my $29 application. 

And David is quite right now that I understand his point -- it's not that I think deprecating runtimes is inherently bad for FMI. In fact, they may feel that runtimes allow people to not buy licenses that might otherwise do so. (And frankly that seems consistent with the Apple model).  But it also means (as in my case) that some customers will simply abandon FMP since the non-runtime alternative is not viable. 

I do think however that it sends a rather concerning message that significant features may be taken out of the program. It's one thing to not continue to develop a feature because you want to put your resources elsewhere, and quite another to remove it completely when people have spent years developing solutions based on that. (Perhaps an equivalent would be if they did away with non-server based sharing even for small numbers of people to force sales of Server.  I'm sure there are people who depend on sharing their database among a small number of people who couldn't justify the cost of licensing server).

I've found a bunch of people who have transitioned from FMP to Livecode/SQLLite and say they'd never go back.  I'm going to start investigating that possibility .

[Rick Whitelaw]

 But it also means (as in my case) that some customers will simply abandon FMP since the non-runtime alternative is not viable. 

 

But those customers are not users of FMP and not customers of FMI. Correct me if I'm wrong, but these are clients who purchase your runtime solutions and don't use FMP. So they can't abandon it and have no relationship with FMI whatsoever.

[MSPJ]

Hi Rick - No - I'm talking about me.  If there's no runtime, then I'm going to ultimately abandon Filemaker as the engine for my solution.  I have no other option.

 

[comment]

knowing it's going away,

​Deprecating something does not necessarily mean it's going away. For example, FMI has deprecated the XML FMPDSORESULT grammar for exporting. That was back in version 7. Eleven years later, and it's still available  - deprecated and all - in version 14.

[Josh Ormond]

mspj,

Don't get me wrong...I don't want to lose that type of functionality. I am really really hoping they go the way of a FileMaker Go for desktop. Free to download, free to run local, non-hosted, single-user files. Same as Go for iOS. I think that is a more viable approach than the runtime. It helps us as developers with the deployment and updating also. If you get what I mean.

Hang in there. I really hope the fear everyone has is for naught. I think what you are doing is great. And highly needed. Kudos to you for making it work.

Edited May 15, 2015 by Josh Ormond

[pixi]

And I don't know how one would get those numbers, even as an approximation. Let FMI run their own business.

​While this is by far not representative it may help to get a slight idea…

https://community.filemaker.com/polls/1227

And isn't "FMIs own business" selling software to developers?

[FredDupuget]

And FileMaker, Inc Replied

[comment]

​While this is by far not representative it may help to get a slight idea…

https://community.filemaker.com/polls/1227

​That is interesting. I wonder what's the difference between "Absolutely" and "Yes". Can something be "relatively essential"?

 

​And isn't "FMIs own business" selling software to developers?

​As I was trying to explain, I don't feel it's my business to ask this question - let alone try to answer it.

[MyBigFM9Project]

Hmm.  If that's the case then they really ought to discontinue the "Advanced" version and roll all the diagnostic utilities into the standard version.  Just my 2 cents worth.

[Kevin Mullins]

mspj,

Don't get me wrong...I don't want to lose that type of functionality. I am really really hoping they go the way of a FileMaker Go for desktop. Free to download, free to run local, non-hosted, single-user files. Same as Go for iOS. I think that is a more viable approach than the runtime. It helps us as developers with the deployment and updating also. If you get what I mean.

Hang in there. I really hope the fear everyone has is for naught. I think what you are doing is great. And highly needed. Kudos to you for making it work.

 

I was thinking that FileMaker Go for desktops wouldn't work to replace runtimes because of the concurrent license costs. I totally forgot that Go currently runs files local on the device.  I think having to download Go for desktop to run a local version file would be a really good idea for FMI.  They get to engage with the end user, get the marketing info and start a new relationship with your customer, before they use your solution.   Now I am going to be disappointed if they don't come out with a go for desktop solution.

[Josh Ormond]

Yeah. It gets our foot in the door, without it costing the customer anything.

[ESpringer]

I'm late to this discussion, but like MSPJ I was considering upgrading to FMPA 14 precisely for the sake of improving my runtime projects -- developing solutions for individual desktop end-users who have no budget (nor enough tech savvy) for dealing directly with FileMaker Pro. In my case (since I have a totally different day job) the loss of Runtime would not send me to a competing platform; I'd just cease being the small-time not-really-for-profit developer that I've been.

It's plausible that customers like me and MSPJ are not typical. I'm also hopeful FileMaker will offer us a relatively seamless transition to an FMP Go desktop-friendly solution. But I suspect that we (this minority of developers catering to non-corporate end users) will be taken into account only if we speak up. 

[Wim Decorte]

developing solutions for individual desktop end-users who have no budget

Is this really the space you want to live in?

I can understand doing pro-bono work and FMI has really good pricing for those kind of projects.  But that's about contributing to the greater good, not building a business.

FMI has recently said that the current runtimes will be in the next version so you have a great many years of useful life out of them.  Nothing to worry about.

If you are trying to build a business you are on the wrong track.  Find customers that are willing to pay.

 

[MSPJ]

Wim - that seems a little narrow-minded.  Are you suggesting that no one has built a successful business selling to end users?  So Intuit really needs to rethink their business model because they aren't making enough money on Quicken and Turbotax? Like Espringer, this is not my day job - but I do hope this will develop into a bigger business eventually, and in the meantime, I'm providing a desperately needed product.  

 

 

[Josh Ormond]

To make a living on a product that sells for $50...you have to sell 10s of thousands per year. To do that, you need a heavy marketing budget.

It's a tough gamble.

Wim's thoughts aren't narrow minded...he just knows there are easier ways to make money doing development.

Edited July 17, 2015 by Josh Ormond

[Wim Decorte]

Wim - that seems a little narrow-minded.  Are you suggesting that no one has built a successful business selling to end users?  

 

You forgot the "with no budget"... 

Of course you can build a successful company selling to end users.   Bu like Josh said, it's a volume game.  You'd have to sell a lot to make a living.  And with "a lot" also comes "a lot" of potential support calls, etc...

 

[MSPJ]

This topic has been quiet for nearly 5 years and someone recently messaged me wondering where I'd gotten to with this issue. Thought I'd give a quick update for anyone who is interested.

I'm currently on FMP 18, and the runtime is still there, but my understanding is it will be gone for real in 19. So the clock has started and I figure I have 2 or 3 years if not longer before 18 won't run on Windows.  I have not had the time to move towards an alternative platform. Maybe I'll get 4 or 5 years out of 18. 

In the time since, I've developed a hosted small business product related to my family version. However, a hosted model is still completely out of the question for the family version.

I continue to work on the family version for essentially zero profit because it is needed.  My kids had special needs growing up and the need to manage all that paperwork is what led to my developing the product. I am committed to maintaining it because my customers tell me it is life saving for them.  And they have some very sobering stories.  (And now of course there is Covid19).

Reading back over this thread, I still feel that the comments about this end user business model are not appropriate (I'm not talking about Claris's model - I'm talking about people like me).  Even if a business like this is difficult to sustain, that would be my problem - it shouldn't bear on this discussion.    Suggesting that people like me shouldn't complain because we had time to prepare is totally off the topic -  this isn't a small business forum - it's a filemaker forum. I'm not complaining about running my business - I'm complaining about a product I've used for over a decade which has removed a significant functionality and offered no alternative.   And now that I have a business version, it is still valuable for me to keep the individual version on this platform because of the shared code base and to enable parallel development. 

Five years later and Claris has offered no alternative path for runtime users. They have not  communicated anything about their decision or the possible impact nor offered any kind of assistance with the transition.

What continues to elude me is why they wouldn't simply offer a reduced fee runtime license.  I have sold my solution to well over a thousand customers. FMI got nothing from that, so I get why that's a problem to them.  But if they offered a runtime license of $50, that would be $50,000. That's 100 times the current cost of an individual license. I could sell my customers on a fee of around $50 - but very few of them could afford $540 for a full license. (And the ones who could, are not the ones desperately in need of this kind of help managing their medical paperwork). 

If a runtime is identical to a regular install with the only limitation being that only one solution can be opened, I don't see why it would cost Claris significantly to maintain it. Instead of maintaining the infrastructure in the standalone product to generate runtimes - why not simply sell the product with an activation process that only allows one database to be opened?  They could then remove all the code from FMP (which they are about to do) and manage it as a particular license type. 

I've tried to figure out a way of bringing this to Claris, but I'm not sure who to approach with this.  Any suggestions?

Michael

PS - To offer another perspective, I used to use Crashplan to backup my home computers. It was probably too inexpensive for what they offered, and at one point, they abruptly decided to close the individual offering, and not provide a way for people to easily save their archives. If you had 10 years of backups on their servers, they were simply going to be deleted. They tried to get people to go to a business plan which was much more expensive. At the time, I decided to abandon their company and not even consider their business offering. This was not primarily because of the cost but because the way they handled the change of their business model made me lose trust in them as a company.  Had they offered a way for people to download their archives and continue to use their desktop software locally, it would have shown that they valued their customers, and I would have been more likely to continue with them.

Similarly, I don't blame Claris for making a decision to focus their efforts wherever they see the most benefit. What I am bothered by is the decision to offer no help to a customer base of developers, some of whom were dependent on this feature. Can they afford to lose those customers with no damage to their revenue? I don't doubt it. But is it a good idea to show customers that you don't include the impact on them in your business plan?  All companies put new development work where it will benefit them the most.  But that's not the same as removing legacy features. Removing things is not the same as not adding new ones.  I have seen no communication whatever from Claris on this topic other than the notification 5 years ago that it was being deprecated.  

[comment]

I think it's too early to judge. There's already an alternative in the form of Filemaker Go, and this could be expanded to the desktop. Though I agree with you about the need for more clarity from Claris.

 

[Wim Decorte]

2 hours ago, MSPJ said:

I'm complaining about a product I've used for over a decade which has removed a significant functionality and offered no alternative.

Why is it on them to offer an alternative?

 

2 hours ago, MSPJ said:

Similarly, I don't blame Claris for making a decision to focus their efforts wherever they see the most benefit. What I am bothered by is the decision to offer no help to a customer base of developers, some of whom were dependent on this feature.

They've been extremely diligent in pre-announcing the deprecation and then the actual deprecation.  5 years worth of advance notice counts as serious help I think.  That's 5 years to migrate away and build up skills in whatever environment is better suited to your needs.

 

2 hours ago, MSPJ said:

I have seen no communication whatever from Claris on this topic other than the notification 5 years ago that it was being deprecated.  

Every year for quite a few years now, Claris/FileMaker holds a yearly roadmap webinar plus a new-version-preview webinar where the runtime feature comes up.

[Fitch]

Have you looked into SBA licensing?