I don't know man, I might not be the target audience (MD of a software company) but I just don't get this. It seems only slightly more useful than say a Google spreadsheet on a platform that yes might have blocks and templates but I didn't see anything there that made me want to switch away from Google Spreadsheets, Trello and a couple of other systems I use to run my 20 person £1mm turnover business. I'll keep it in…
Spolsky's discussion of Excel is probably the best way to understand Airtable: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-diff... > Over the next two weeks we visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call “calculations.” Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table. > What was I talking about? Oh yeah…
"Oh hey, I just need to fire off some data rapidly in an organized way. Boop, done." And that's the trick, isn't it? The need to rapidly organize previously un-organized data. It's not a case of, "I know exactly how I want to rapidly organize some data."
With Airtable, it would be "I now have to navigate this decoupled spread out GUI and learn what all these abstract terms mean, when all I want to do is calculate how much we spent on ice cream last month."
In essence, it is making the workflow slower for those types of people.
On the other end of the spectrum, from a programmer's point of view, GUI's ALWAYS slow things down. This is why programmers who used VIM / Emacs were faster than those using modern IDE's. It's why hot-keys are important to both technical and non-technical workers. Presentation does not equal productivity. The presentation is what Airtable is pushing as the abstraction for non-technical users.
If the target audience for Airtable is instead small-business startups - then those startups are going to be in for a world of hurt when they need to get into real business development. They will have wasted time, energy, and resources to get set up on a lego platform that they'll need to migrate away from.
Looking at the pricing model and data limitations, there's nothing that would make this a better choice than just hooking up to AWS or something similar, directly. Using Airtable would require maintaining some form of middleware for SPA's...and there's no way in the world that you wouldn't be hitting their caps rapidly. Just an extra cost.
I'm not saying this product won't work well for a market niche, but that niche is a lot smaller than the buzz words thrown around in today's publications.