Finally the last discussion was debated, the last long email thread was terminated, the last agreement made, and the last document collected. It was then all up to me to collate all those bullet points and write the DevExpress roadmap for 2013.
This year, perhaps more than the previous ones, there was much uncertainty about what path we should take. Perhaps uncertainty is the wrong word, ambiguity might be a better one. And path implies there’s just one road to take, whereas in reality there were several directions to follow. Despite what you may believe, DevExpress is not a vast enterprise with resources out the wazoo: we do have to pick and choose what we do; and carefully at that.
The first decision was possibly the easiest. I’ve talked about this at length before, but it bears repeating: the web is this giant juggernaut of a train. You miss it at your peril. It’s not just “web sites” anymore. It’s “single page applications”, it’s “responsiveness”, it’s “mobile” in all its wild wonderful forms, it’s the “cloud”, it’s all of these separately and together. So, first of all we are concentrating on our ASP.NET story, and our HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript story in DXTREME.
The second was perhaps equally as important and equally as straightforward: improve our “thick client” offerings, especially WinForms, WPF and VCL. Not all of our customers are writing the next killer web app (someone do Google Reader 2.0, please?) but are heads down in implementing awesome Windows applications. The rich data-fed Windows app is not going away, despite the maturity of each particular run-time. Hence we are spending some resources this year on polishing and enhancing these libraries (the new smooth scrolling is awesome, just as one example), and cementing our pole position as provider of Windows app components, no matter which technology you prefer.
The third decision was to continue to enhance our dashboard, reporting, charting, and data analysis products, at an aggressive pace. We have many innovative ideas for these products, some of which you’ll see this year and some in 2014 or later.
Anyway, for more details, please peruse the roadmap here. Note that it does not and cannot cover every single suggestion or feature that we’ll be implementing, for then it would be tens of pages long and I’d never have finished it. And as I say every year on one way or another, use it for guidance, but don’t make solid plans based on it.
It does promise to be a banner year though; let’s see what develops.