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Issue 14.6

FEATURE

Xojo Past and Future

After 20 years, Xojo is still going strong

Issue: 14.6 (November/December 2016)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 10,479
Starting Page Number: 14
Article Number: 14603
Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

The Xojo Developers Conference 2016 kicked off in Houston, Texas, on October 5th with a keynote address by Xojo CEO Geoff Perlman where he outlined the future of the development tool and took a brief look at how far it has come (see Figures 1-3).

This year Xojo celebrates its 20th anniversary—a remarkable achievement when you consider the speed of change in the volatile tech community. Geoff emphasized this by pointing out how many of Xojo's competitors that existed when the original company launched in 1996 are no longer around. Microsoft's Visual Basic 6, Apple's MPW, Borland's Delphi, Think C, Metrowerks' Codewarrior, Sun's Java are either gone or so substantially changed they aren't the same product.

Xojo has changed, too—much more than just the name, as none of the original platforms it targeted are supported any more—yet the basic language still works the same. Add in all the new platforms (Web, iOS, Raspberry Pi) and new features and you have a stable, but growing development environment.

Part of the reason Xojo has survived and been so successful is that the company is utterly dependent upon the product. Not only is it their core product instead of just one among many, but they "eat their own dog food" as the saying goes. The Xojo IDE is built in Xojo, as is unit/regression testing, build automation, and several of the frameworks.

It's also important to remember that those 1996 competitors weren't small companies—betting on a brand name isn't a guarantee the product will be around 20 years later.

Geoff also explained how he was proud of his company's low employee turnover rate of 5% (compared to the best tech companies' 9%).

...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.