NET with data stored in SQL Server or Oracle or DB2 databases. Stay up-to-date by subscribing to the Comments RSS Feed for this post.Enterprise developers these days are usually heads down, in the trenches working on in-depth applications using Java or. I'm glad that Apple/Claris/FileMaker/whatever the subsidiary is called is *finally* getting into the more freemium space, but I have to be honest, this feels very much too little, too late.

From the webinar preview of Claris Studio that I quickly perused through, this is absolutely not a competitive product compared not just to the likes of Airtable and the Power Platform, but compared to Retool, Appsmith, Tableau (which thanks to now being owned by Salesforce, has all kinds of synergies for many of the types of customers that would use Claris, because I bet most of Claris's high dollar customers also use Salesforce in some capacity) and countless others that have raised insane amounts of money. So Microsoft is happy to continue to make updates every few years and continue to offer support.īut as far as bringing in net new customers or even convincing existing ones to use the Claris suite? I just don't see it. Like, Microsoft still supports Access, even though all the investment is in Power Platform, and it's because there are still lots of legacy users and systems that rely on it that either don't want to migrate or can't. I am sure there are a lot of enterprise customers and SMBs who have relied on FileMaker for a long time that keeps sustaining its support, but this cannot be a growing business segment at all.

And then it wouldn't be a decade behind the other low-code/no-code solutions that have absolutely captured the industry and more importantly, expanded the slice of tooling that this industry niche used to consume. I keep thinking about Bento and that if FileMaker/Claris/Apple/whatever they call this division now had continued to invest in that product (which had an online component, albeit not a cloud component IIRC) and take it to the next level, Apple could have had a real Airtable competitor that they could have also scaled up under the FileMaker Pro branding.

What does a filemaker pro app look like