FileMakery, Part II
In Part I of FileMakery, I argue that FileMaker Pro’s (FMP) value is primarily defined by what it does for working professionals and non-technical users; lose this aspect of FileMaker and the product ceases to be relevant to its user base. FileMaker Pro may not be quite the product that a segment of developers want, but I think that it is exactly the product that a large and traditionally under-served group of users needs.
But let me qualify this a bit. This isn’t a critique about innovation on FileMaker Inc’s (FMI) part. In many ways, the current generation of FileMaker (7/8) is inspired. FMI has done a lot of things right. In all the essential ways, FileMaker Pro is still easy to use, and some would argue that it is even easier now. On top of this, FMI has worked hard to break the technical limitations of the product and to gain credibility among the technical community. FMI appears to have addressed many of the principal IT objections that have threatened to take the product away from the hands of its loyal customers. With the addition of a much improved security framework and serious connectivity features, FMI has made real inroads in convincing IT that it can be a good corporate citizen.
The net result is that in addition to making things better for non-technical folk, I think that the technology gains in the current shipping versions of FileMaker (v8.0, 8.5) have also helped those who are in the business of providing professional FileMaker services such as consulting or custom application development. Retail consumers of the product have benefited but so have a big chunk of career FileMaker developers on the service side of the equation. I would love to hear from those in the field, but from this vantage point, the economic symbiosis between regular-joe-working-pro and FileMaker professional guru seems as healthy as ever.
All indications are that the demand for outside expertise has increased as FileMaker Pro has become more sophisticated. Assuming that FileMaker’s market share actually expands, the long term prospects of the FileMaker service economy appear to be expanding robustly.
The FileMaker Pro we know today is far from being a "toy." Technologically, it is capable of solving many serious business problems. If there were doubts about this in the past, the improvements in FileMaker 7/8 today represents a generational leap forward in quelling those concerns. It is an ideal platform for many roles. It continues to be an ideal tool for working professionals but, in my view, it has become an even better platform for "consultingware"–at least the more practical and sensible sort.
The issue at hand, however, isn’t whether FileMaker Pro is capable of serious work. It is whether FileMaker Pro can be more than consultingware. Can FileMaker Pro support the business and practice of writing commercial software products instead of one-off solutions? I am speaking about a class of solutions that are mostly standard and often characterized as "vertical market" solutions.
It is one thing to provide highly targeted professional technical services in the form of consulting or custom software development and another to deliver products that more generally address the needs of a domain. Some of the difference has to do with the economics of "totally-custom" versus that of "mostly-standard" software. To frame this is specific terms, take the example of creating a sales report for one particular business, say "Bob’s Boat Building, Inc." versus that of creating a generic sales report that works for types of businesses. That sales report for Bob the boat-builder can be constructed with hardcoded and highly specific calculated fields that aren’t meaningful to anyone else. However, a generic sales report might require an abstraction layer manifested as additional structure or application logic. When a software application has to address patterns of problems rather than highly defined problems, it calls for a new dimension engineering complexity. In FileMaker terms, this can mean significantly extra work. There comes a point where the investment sunk into solving these problems become valuable in its own right, where application logic itself becomes a valued work-product–intellectual property that ceases to be disposable.
Beyond Consultingware
Independent developers are appealing for features that help them stay in the commercial software business: a richer, more interconnected development interface, reusable code, modular programming features, software architecture that makes it easier change, update, support and deploy and the ability to collaborate with others so that we can do more things and do them faster.
All this begs the big question, why write commercial, mostly-standard software in FileMaker Pro in the first place? There are plenty of interesting options for independent software developers including 4D, RealBasic, and now Servoy, to name a few; why FileMaker? The sensible thing to do might be to take the pragmatic tack and use FileMaker for things it is principally designed to do but look elsewhere for features that support commercial software development.
My position on this question has changed somewhat. In the past, I have been lukewarm on the idea of developing generic commercial software solutions with FileMaker Pro. Sure, you can push the limits of consultingware; and with a carefully balanced business model, it may be possible to sustain a good business with a mixture of solutions and services using FileMaker. But generally, I have questioned the wisdom of a product-only business model anchored around FileMaker because the short-term gains by getting to market relatively cheaply are offset by the significantly greater marginal costs of making changes, updating existing installations or fixing problems. Until it becomes easier to modularize code and to deploy solutions to customers, the success of a product-only business model using FileMaker will rest precariously on one’s ability to find a middle ground between scalability on one hand and unwieldy complexity on the other.
I am, however, increasingly convinced that the FileMaker community needs these sorts of commercial solutions for a couple of reasons. The first is more pragmatic and self-preservationistic; the second is more idealistic.
On the pragmatic front, unless FileMaker Pro can be bundled with every computer or be priced as an entry level product on the retail front like Quicken as compared to Quickbooks, it seems unlikely that FMI is going to grow a large direct-to-end-user customer base through retail sales. My assumption is that, short of a more drastic differentiation of the FileMaker Pro product line, it seems that more and more, people are going to get their hands on FileMaker Pro through their organization in the form of volume or site-licenses.
Growth in volume license sales is a good thing especially for FileMaker Pro developers and consultants. However, I’d argue that this market is going to need more than custom solutions (consultingware, etc.) to keep decision makers interested in the platform in the long term. The service side of the FileMaker community is necessary but the FileMaker community as a whole needs vertical market applications like AdBlocks (by AdSails, Michael Phelp’s advertising workflow management system, now rebuilt in Servoy) and New Millennium’s Genesis accounting package (Danny Mack).
Commercial solutions strengthen the FileMaker brand. While the developers of these solutions represent an extremely small fraction of FileMaker Pro sales, their solutions give decision-makers a reason to invest in volume-licenses of FileMaker. It makes the value of FileMaker Pro tangible to organizations. In other words, the productivity message reaches domain experts like Bob the Boat Builder. It empowers individuals. The solutions message gives entire organizations a reason to use FileMaker Pro. It empowers organizations, and organizations buy volume-licenses.
On the idealistic front. FileMaker Pro is a technology ecosystem in which many types of solutions can thrive to solve different but connected kinds of information problems. It occupies a unique space in the software universe in that people can be happy with the platform for different reasons. FileMaker Pro has something for everyone in an organization. Sally the sales manager can easily get her sales reports crunched; Peter the office productivity guru can whip up mailing labels with the flair of Emeril, Bam!; Brian the business owner of Bedrock Widgets can deploy a Filemaker CRM solution from The Serious Solutions Group, Inc. and take comfort in the synergy and cost savings found in having a common information platform across the company. For commercial solution developers, selling solutions into an environment that already uses FileMaker in a diverse way makes these solutions less likely to be dislodged by non-FileMaker based systems.
This story of synergy would be nice if it were completely true today. Non-consultingware, commercial grade CRM solutions in Filemaker Pro exist, but these more or less-out-of-the-box products are few and far between. Those that exists are generally not competitive with other commercial systems in and of themselves. The market for FileMaker commercial products is weak, and the lack of credible solutions such as the former Adbock erodes the confidence of decision-makers that FileMaker can play more entrenched, mission critical roles in an organization. This in turn weakens FileMaker’s overall brand as a serious piece of software.
To be fair, in some ways FMI seems to support the thinking that commercial solutions make FileMaker a more compelling product. The FileMaker website showcases solutions and FMI marketing has paid attention to things like "starter solutions" to lay the groundwork for why FileMaker has value out-of-the box. But the product itself, even with FileMaker Pro Advanced, does not fully embrace the notion that software development is a different exercise than productivity data mash-up. The existence of commercial FileMaker solutions feels a bit like a side-effect of FileMaker’s flexibility rather than a purposely intended child of the FileMaker corporate mothership. They are a nice bonus at which FMI might raised a puzzled eyebrow but are nonetheless happier to have than not.
Where to?
I have participated in my fair share of lobbying and persuasive actions behind the scenes to influence FMI’s product future. Through it all, I am struck by how the agenda and the list of feature requests posed by us professional developers are at generally at odds with the things that made FileMaker great in the first place. "At odds" may be too strong an expression, "not directly relevant" may be better. I am wary the efforts of our vocal minority will cause more harm that good. I would hate to see FileMaker Pro so fundamentally altered that it ceases to be meaningful to its core constituents. Yet, ignoring developers’ needs isn’t the answer either.
FileMaker Inc. seems to be dealing with this conundrum by trying to make everyone happy with within the same product continuum. With each new release, they seem to be trying hard to accommodate developers’ needs but they do so by casting these features in terms of end-user functionality. I am not sure why this has to be so, but I do believe that this sort of strategy is not sustainable. The current user interface of the product cannot support both types of activities equally well. My view is that the product line needs further differentiation.
To be clear, I don’t actually want FileMaker Pro to be a different kind of application. I do want FileMaker Inc. to have different kinds of products, one that allows non-technical users to discover the magic of FileMakery and another that lets developers take those discoveries to market. An actual developer’s version may be a loss-leader for FMI, but without it, I don’t see a lot of new interest among the younger generation of entrepreneurs and developers. Combine that with attrition of existing commercial software developers and we have a bleeding of technical excellence at the top end and along with it the platform’s credibility. In the end, the real victim here will be the traditional FileMaker users such as the domain experts and information-centric working professionals. They may not aspire to be software engineers or technoratis; they just want to get their jobs done but will continue to find themselves fighting a battle to convince the powers-that-be that FileMaker Pro is not just a tool for the self-assured corporate database hero.
Ernest Koe, in a two part article, lays out a case for changes in the FileMaker product line, and—at least implicitly—for changes in the underlying concept of what constitutes FileMaker Pro and its core markets.
He particularly notes, in a key passage:
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Commercial solutions strengthen the FileMaker brand. While the developers of these solutions represent an extremely small fraction of FileMaker Pro sales, their solutions give decision-makers a reason to invest in volume-licenses of FileMaker.
For commercial solution developers, selling solutions into an environment that already uses FileMaker in a diverse way makes these solutions less likely to be dislodged by non-FileMaker based systems.
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He then neatly encapsulates the dilemma: