Filemaker Pro will be renamed Claris Pro and is apparently going to be free for single users when the next version is released:
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This actually bothers me a lot more than a price hike would. Iâll reserve my final judgment until this actually ships, butâŚ
Looking at this article, it seems that Claris is shifting its focus entirely on developing cloud-based applications. They no longer seem to have any interest in a desktop database user. Will there even be a desktop app or will everything be focused on cloud apps?
Their âfree for single userâ tier doesnât look like the product theyâre shipping now. It looks like (and they even said so in the article) Amazonâs AWS free tier - so small developers can develop a cloud app without needing a paid-up license until theyâre ready to deploy. Not so individual users can get a free product to use on their home computers.
It seems to me that the very concept of standalone FileMaker is en route to being killed off altogether.
For the foreseeable future my guess is that there will continue to be be a cloud and terrestrial version. Without the super duper cloud version FileMaker would not be as attractive to midsized to large businesses with many seats as well as many mobile users. FileMaker can facilitate stuff like inventory management and mobile tracking, HR issues, synchronization. Big and mid sized businesses are most probably an extremely profitable market share, but personal users and small businesses are about as important to Clarisâ bottom line as well. If this were not the case Claris would have shut down allowing third party web hosting for FileMaker for starters.
Claris does not require their own cloud service for FileMaker users. FileMaker Server is run by Amazon and is a great option for businesses of all sizes. And FileMaker runs equally as well on other servers, from the smallest to the largest. And the the single user, non cloud option is alive and well.
What I think is very interesting about this scenario is that FileMaker is still a database that works well for personal as well as small and large businesses. And FileMaker still sounds like they are unique in that even a coding dummy like me with no technical training, background or talent, and no patience at all, can build effective and easy to use databases in comparatively no time at all.
+1 for the recommendation for LibreOffice as a file converter for your old ClarisWorks or AppleWorks documents. It recovered a number of files of mine that Iâd never gotten around to moving to Pages (nor Word, nor Markdown, etc.).
I never used much besides the word processor in ClarisWorks, but that served me well during my college paper writing years, after I decided to switch from Microsoft Word 5 (for reasons mysterious to me these days).
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