I seem to have missed something

[Kevin Miller]

Hi Bob,

Thanks for posting this.

If you ask 10 LiveCode customers what is important to them, you'll get 10 different answers. As an obvious example, I expect that if you were to ask others on this list about mobile, many people would disagree that mobile is less important. I appreciate you don't believe you need some of the new features we are delivering now. That might be actually true. Or it might be that you just haven't had a chance to try them yet. Either way that's ok. Many, many customers do see what we are delivering in Create as the top priority.

I also appreciate there are features with reasonably broad appeal that we would like to be delivering sooner. That's an important part of what is driving the change in business model. We are delivering a lot of value, but not capturing it, so moving too slowly for some. We subsidize LiveCode development from our profitable services arm and there are limits to how much we can do that. We simply have to change all that. I would very much like to deliver a consistently better service without running promotions or crowd funding or anything else, just using licensing revenue.

There is another context to think about our Create project from too. One of the questions we talk about often internally is - does our platform have what it takes to attract new users at a healthy and sustainable rate? This is something that should be important to you and all our community. The fact is that it takes something very different to attract a new customer today compared to days gone by. We don't have the luxury of standing still. Along with the desire to create a better product for the majority of you who do want the new capabilities, this question strongly contributes to the direction we are taking with Create. Creating and maintaining a strong ecosystem around the platform is vital to us all.

A dear friend and mentor of mine has a favourite saying "if you don't like change, you'll like irrelevance even less". So I appreciate the input, and I hope you can understand that it doesn't perhaps create a viable strategy for the platform as a whole.

In terms of your own licensing question - either these are commercial apps being created for your company as an employee or you're creating them in your own time and own the IP. You may be able apply Application Payments to the latter case. If you want specific input into your exact circumstance, I'm going to ask you to contact support where we will be happy to help.

Kind regards,

Kevin

Kevin Miller ~ kevin at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/ 
LiveCode: Build Amazing Things 



On 25/07/2024, 17:55, "use-livecode on behalf of Bob Sneidar via use-livecode" <use-livecode-bounces at lists.runrev.com <mailto:use-livecode-bounces at lists.runrev.com> on behalf of use-livecode at lists.runrev.com <mailto:use-livecode at lists.runrev.com>> wrote:

It’s water under the bridge, but in retrospect I think the proper way for Livecode to have structured their business was to have 3 products: Livecode Desktop, Livecode Mobile and Livecode Web. Each product should have maintained their own revenue stream unbound and unburdened by the other two. As it is, any financial burden developing for Mobile or Web is shared by Desktop. If one fails, all fail.

I also think that the Non-Commercial version we used to have (as much as I took advantage of it) was a bad idea. Give people something for free that they would otherwise have to pay for, guess what? They will use the free thing.

Finally, I think that Livecode, much like Now Software of the past, overextended themselves. Now Software tried to develop a new product from the ground up and learned what all developers learn: It’s REALLY HARD to do.

Livecode attempted to incorporate what I would consider to be niche technologies, so their resources have become much diluted. The native compiler project is dead I assume. Mobile is probably sucking resources from other things because it seems like every other week iOS or Android are making prior builds obsolete by their incessant changes. V10 has taken how many years to produce? Don’t get me started on Artificial Intelligence!! And I don’t NEED a no-code way to develop apps. I LIKE CODING!!

All I ever wanted was to create utility apps to make my life and my job easier. That is it. I don’t need the bells and whistles, but I have been investing in those all these years just to keep desktop deveopment alive. Now I will not be able to afford developing for just the 3 internal users I have, and approaching my employer to incorporate my applipaction throughout the company is dead in the water. Thank GOD I didn’t already do so!

So by whenever in 2027 this awesome party ends, I will likely bid farewell to you all and consider abandoning my development hobby completely. It feels like I have been given 2 years to live.

Bob S