The year Steve introduced the iPhone at MacWorld I spoke with a number of senior engineers at Apple and begged them to look at Tableau ( ) an amazing data visualization program that was groundbreaking back then (and still is).

What Filemaker AND Apple need to do is sit back and figure out a better way for folks to perform tasks (see 'jobs theory' story: ) I volunteer at Burning Man and they dumped Filemaker for SalesForce about two years ago. The lack of wider SQL integration is certainly welcome in FMP v15, but for many companies this is too little too late as they have moved on to cloud based databases (Oracle, Sales Force, and SAP for example). Bento (a small stand along version of Filemaker for iOS) was great - easy to use, able to tie back into the larger database, but really most of what it did could have been done easier using a flat file data base (such as Excel or Numbers). It is a relational database (initially one of the very few that supported Apple's OS) owned by Apple, but never really promoted or integrated into Apple products. Filemaker has always been a square peg trying to fill a round hole.

Filemaker pro alternatives for mac