We’re getting more and more questions about ‘the long term’ planning for SAFE. I think there are three aspects to these kinds of questions.

1) We’re constantly hearing about ‘the death of the desktop’. But all the while, we see Microsoft continue to sell more and more copies of Windows. The truth is that the desktop is going to be with us for many, many years to come and applications like SAFE are the reason why. Put in one sentence: a desktop Windows application is the fastest, safest, most accurate way to input and retrieve data. Period. We believe that most of our larger customers are extremely reluctant to abandon those advantages.

2) We ourselves have contributed a bit to the confusion what with an excess of ‘products’. Unfortunately, this has been unavoidable. As you may know, the real differentiators between all our products is the database. Windows people run SQL Server which is fast but expensive. OS/SAFE runs on MySQL, which is cheap but was previously not as fast. That’s changing. So over time we’d like to see our customers move to MySQL now that its performance has really improved. Once that occurs, we can simplify your choices greatly.

So we have two meta-goals:

• Provide our customers a ‘cloud-based solution’ that really works.
• Make it easy to go back and forth between desktop and web-based devices.

Looming over everything we do is that phrase ‘backward compatibility’. The speed of our transition (or lack thereof as some complain) is because the not-sexy-at-all job of making these changes without interfering with your running code is a seriously daunting task. It probably doesn’t seem to be all that ‘sexy’ compared with lots of computer stuff (phones, CGI movies 😀 ) but it is hard to keep updating SAFE transparently for as wide a variety of customers as we have. The Maytag repairman gets no rewards. 😀

So we’re continuing our ‘two-pronged attack’. 2014 will be all about the introduction of OS/SAFE but it will also a big ‘under the hood’ year for WinSAFE. For Windows desktop users, most of those updates will be about transparently migrating your database to MySQL. We will, of course, encourage you to make the move to OS/SAFE when you’re ready for web-based applications but again, getting everyone on a database that can be hosted anywhere is what will free SAFE from your server closet once and for all!

By 2015, you’ll (finally) have the best of both worlds: you’ll be able to run SAFE on your desktop and from a web browser with no in-house server and with one configuration. In other words, customisationss to screens, forms and code will automatically present themselves to both platforms. That will save you money and make SAFE even more flexible.