About my use of FM:

I use FM Pro ver 8.5. I purchased this product in July 2006.

About Filemaker releases and Leopard

FMP ver 8.5 was released occurred during the mid-life cycle of OS X Tiger (April 2005 until Oct 2007). Steve Jobs made a public announcement in June 2005 that Apple intended to release Leopard towards the end of 2006 or early 2007. As we all know, the eventual release was Oct 2007, the delay said to be because Apple wanted to concentrate on iPhone and its release.

About Filemaker

This is a wholly owned business of Apple Inc

About Filemaker's reasons for denying service releases for versions prior to FMP ver 9.0

At the FM website, the company disowns any responsibility to release service releases or patches for versions of FMP prior to ver 9.0. It is claimed that at the time that version 8.5 was released, they had no knowledge of Leopard and its requirements. Accordingly, the corporation feels that it has no responsibility to its recent customers, all of whom have expended large $$ for a product that cannot even perform pivot tables!!

My assessment of this situation

Filemaker Corp is clearly distorting the truth and is in denial. When Ver 8.5 was released, it is now known that Leopard's development was well underway. Further, the so-called upgrade from version 8.0 to 8.5 was cosmetic in functionality (but became a universal binary I recall). To make matters even more depressing for those poor people using version 8.5 was that version 9.0 adds very little in the way of fundamental or ground-breaking features - version 9.0 is little more than a way of getting earlier version users to upgrade. They force users to do this by refusing to support recent past users of the product. This abuse of users by Fm is scandalous and is made even more pathetic by the fact that this is an Apple business. I simply refuse to accept the distorted explanations posted on the FM website re Leopard support.

And...the company has the cheek to flog a new product called Bento to Leopard users. Please.....