FileMakerFeller

"Provision" is a term with special meaning in accounting. Basically, if you expect something to happen in future financial years you can formally recognise it in the current financial year; the aim is to document prudent management and alert (prospective) company owners to the potential for events that will meaningfully impact the financial state of the company in the medium term. If the expectation turns out to be incorrect, the provision can be unwound by another formal process. You can think of it as something like a lien, or a hedge: just in case this future event comes to pass, the company has allocated resources to deal with that eventuality.

However, as other commenters have pointed out, in large firms provisions can be utilised to reduce the tax burden in the current financial year for reasons that bear very little relation to prudent management.

goofy1958 said:

mikethemartian said:

ericthehalfbee said:

Amazing how entitled the EU thinks they are where they can pass a law for themselves, but feel they should be allowed to take 20% of a companies global revenues for any infraction that only exists within their market.

It’s no different than Apple or Google making their developers pay a hefty fee. They have the bargaining power to get their developers to pay on their terms and the EU has the bargaining power to get Apple and Google to pay on its terms. Entitlement and fairness have nothing to do with it. It is just business.

The $99 fee to be a developer is “hefty”? And then if I develop a free app, Apple gets nothing. How is that hefty at all?

I think mtm is including the 30% commission in that statement.

And if one's perspective is that the 30% is just a fee that doesn't bring any benefits, then that's reasonable: losing a third of one's revenue to a third party for no perceived benefit is a bad deal.

However, that 30% pays for a lot. It removes the friction from the buying process; users know that they can easily delete an app they don't want and that Apple is going to side with them if they request a refund from the developer. It's hard to measure just how much this has affected the market for mobile software and digital services in a manner that everyone will agree with, but as a rough estimate we can just look at the reported revenues - and I don't have figures to hand, but I'm guessing it's now more than 100x what it was in 2008. This is, of course, a communal benefit rather than an individual benefit, so there is very little recognition of its value by those viewing the landscape through the lens of the software developer.

The 30% fee also pays for hosting, data transfer, payment processing, reporting services, malware scanning and a bunch of other annoying little things that lots of people think they can do by themselves for less money. This is where I have some sympathy for the arguments being put forth but respectfully point out that not everyone shares that viewpoint. Still, if there is competition for those services that a significant portion of the developer community would like to take advantage of, that's probably worth promoting and Apple should not be restricting developers from seeking alternatives.

Then again, part of the 30% fee also goes to the app review and code signing process. Digitally signing the application bundle would be worthless without the review, so those cannot be separated. Code signing is a security measure enforced at the OS level; it's perfectly reasonable for Apple to do that but it comes with the cost of added complexity and trust issues. Paying for it via the store's commission is an efficient approach. App review feels like a process that should be a per-app fee but that could mean several hours of a reviewer's time at something in the region of US$150 per hour... I think rolling that into the 30% commission is reasonable.

It's worth remembering that Apple is operating at a huge scale with the App Store. By aggregating their costs and apportioning them over a very large number of developers Apple is able to massively reduce the per-developer cost of those services and spread their risk; in return they make a significant profit. AWS does the same thing; purportedly the margins are in the 60% range for Amazon and yet developers love the service because they think they're getting a bargain.

I think developers need to be reminded that setting up a business is an expensive process and that all those costs used to be payable up front; the trade-off for being able to start the business at a lower up-front cost is that you have to pay more later on.

byronl said:

This probably won't be used in the workplace since it's apple only and very rarely every single person in the team has apple products.

Also there are quite a few competitors with more features, I don't know if this will be used at all, in the workplace at least.

Curious to see why Apple made this, probably so it becomes a real life brainstorming and collaborative tool for Apple's AR products.

I'm guessing that, like a lot of Apple products, this was made to be a tool that the people at Apple want to use themselves. In that case, why not release it publicly to get more feedback that will help them iterate to a more polished version?

It's a bit more complicated than that.

Right now, Claris have essentially forked the codebase for the "Claris FileMaker Platform" and the "Claris Platform" - what I've been hearing is that Claris, Inc. has been dealing with widespread piracy for so long that they finally have had enough. A few years ago, they introduced the concept of the "Claris ID" and now, with the "Claris Platform", that Claris ID must be used to sign into the application.

Knowing that this step would be untenable for a significant portion of their customers, Claris is continuing to develop, sell and support the existing "Claris FileMaker Platform" that does not have such a requirement. For customers with on-premise deployments and, more importantly, custom authentication management (such as Active Directory), the Claris ID is never going to fly. It's hard enough to keep AD up-to-date, let alone some third party's user database, and employee information is sensitive - some jurisdictions have legislation that requires something as simple as "does this person work for this company?" to be kept confidential.

The new versions of FileMaker are a welcome confirmation that Claris is continuing to support existing customers. But the "Claris FileMaker Platform" is now legacy software and at some point in the future it will be dropped (I'm guessing somewhere around 2030 given the complexities involved).

The "Claris Platform" is priced higher than the "Claris FileMaker Platform" and includes access to the applications of the "Claris FileMaker Platform" (FileMaker Pro, FileMaker Server and the free FileMaker Go app for iOS). But you also get Claris Pro, Claris Server, Claris Go (currently US-only), Claris Connect (a web-based tool for interacting much more easily with Web APIs, although only a limited set of APIs are supported) and Claris Studio (a web-based tool for providing anonymous access to data over the web, highly scalable but with an extremely limited feature set right now).

Claris still have not worked out a solid roadmap for the "Claris Platform" products. They've got solid principles in place and plenty of ideas they're trying to flesh out, but in my opinion they released this stuff well before it was ready for prime time. Claris Server is only available on Linux (FileMaker Server is available for macOS, Windows Server and Linux). Claris Studio is being developed at a tremendous pace, but the bug database is growing just as fast and the integration with Claris Pro is not as seamless as it should be: "bleeding edge" is the appropriate term. The developer community is taking a largely positive attitude and providing a lot of the stress-testing, but there are also a lot of noses out of joint.

The current expectation is that Claris will announce the details of the "freemium" version of the "Claris Platform" (and only the "Claris Platform") in late January of 2023 - maybe early February, we'll see how things pan out. The "free" tier is expected to make all the development and testing features available but to block the sharing features: the thinking behind it is trying to make learning the product free but using the product the point where the company makes money.

For the past decade the management team at Claris (and, clearly, at Apple) have been looking at the valuations afforded to various competitors in the "low-code/no-code" space that have web-only access, and there's a fair amount of motivation to gain similar market share, notoriety and revenue. The problem is that this approach is at odds with the approach that has given the company its current success: OS-native software that provided a better interface than HTML5 could deliver, guaranteed information sovereignty because of on-premise installation, and simplicity that had a very low performance penalty (the learning curve is gentle). The historic approach is not without its problems: lack of integration with modern software development tools and approaches, negative perceptions in the minds of "traditional" IT people (leading to a lack of exposure to new computer users), lack of scalability to the levels now expected in the Internet age.

FileMaker has strengths that are not offered by any other product or service on the market. Bar none. It is much more capable than AirTable or similar products in terms of what you can build, but scalability and web accessibility need substantial improvement to compete in the present environment. Claris have decided to use a different tech stack to build a separate product to solve those problems which is unusual but not necessarily a bad thing. As long as they implement it well and gain some mindshare I think they've got at least another 30 years of success ahead of them.

Marvin said:

There's probably a way to make it work well for most people. What people want is control over their association. Companies don't want their brands to be shown next to offensive content because it makes it look like they are directly funding it. Twitter would need to identify offensive content/language and users and isolate the advertising from it and give advertisers assurance that this is happening. They can give advertisers the option to only run ads on selected groups of users with different grades of content.

I think that the underlying issue is that even those espousing/consuming ideas that the advertisers find unsavoury are still potentially viable customers. Advertisers don't want to miss out on potential sales and they think that targeted slots are the mechanism that allows them to balance these concerns.

I think that the simplest solution for Twitter is to not show ads as part of a feed, but I've never used the service so I don't have a suggestion as to where they could be placed instead. Maybe each advertiser can have an account that they post content to, and users can decide to follow them if they find the information relevant? That would, of course, put the power back in the hands of the users and advertisers would balk at the loss of control - then again, it would mean that any appearance of an advertisement next to objectionable content can be directly attributed to the choices of that particular user. Discovery of new advertisers could perhaps be driven by a "most popular tweets" section with different categories; possibly even a system where Twitter becomes a paid service but following a certain number of advertisers means the user gets their subscription fee waived.