Business Application Framework

[Richard Gaskin]

Richmond wrote:
> I don't think LiveCode will thrive if it continues to present itself to
> the world in the way it is just now.
>
> The more people who state their opinion, the more healthy and
> pluralistic the debate will become, and the more likely that LiveCode
> will sit up and take notice *seriously*: something I believe it should
> have done a very long time ago.

If all you're asking for is what you wrote, you'd have been satisfied 
long ago.  Given the regular acknowledgement of the opinions presented 
here, I think it's safe to say they've taken notice.

Respectfully, it would seem you're asking for something else, not just 
"taking notice", but actually implementing specific suggestions.

But which ones?

Our community has offered many suggestions, but taken as a whole they 
don't always agree, and sometimes even contradict one another.  As a 
community discussion that's fine, but as business guidance it becomes 
more challenging.

Should we put company decisions to a vote?  On a certain level that 
might seem sensible, since we're the customers so it would seem that we 
know what's best.

But we're today's customers, many of us with backgrounds in other 
xTalks, a dialect largely unknown to the modern world if it weren't for 
LiveCode.  Tomorrow's customers are very different, and anything learned 
by surveying current customers risks missing critical information about 
the needs of tomorrow's.  A bright future will depend on having new 
customers outnumber old ones many times over.

So maybe we should put company decisions to a vote, but only among 
newcomers.  Or give newcomers 5 votes to our 1.

But many newcomers are coming from the open source world, which is 
important for the growth of the platform but doesn't do as much for 
immediate short-term revenue.

So should we have open source newcomers with 4 votes, and entrepreneur 
newcomers with 5?

And how many of any of us, ol' timers and newcomers alike, have 
demonstrated experience managing a software company the size of RunRev?

And of those, how many have done so in the dev tools space, with its 
limited Total Addressable Market Size?

I think the properly exploiting the opportunity of LiveCode is an 
inherently non-trivial problem, and will requiring a mix of creativity 
and courage to explore solutions, because I don't believe I've seen 
anything like LiveCode before so we have little in the way of rote 
knowledge to draw from.

But if there's anything in recent discussions on which there's anything 
close to unanimity, whether from ol' timers or newcomers, whether from 
open source developers or proprietary entrepreneurs, it's that 
maintaining feature parity between Community and Commercial as close as 
practical is important for everyone.

Now we just have to figure out what "as close as practical" means....

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  LiveCode Community Manager
  richard at livecode.org