Google Docs gets an API for task automation

A logical feature, which I may even use. However -

Business-oriented releases like this need to come with a guarantee of existence for X years (some reasonable number) if Google expects anyone to use this for business purposes -- especially any paid/G-suite version (or whatever their premium version is called this week). Even then, it'd be a tough sell, as simply not shutting off the servers doesn't mean they'll actually actively update and support it.

Google, an advertising company, is competing against Microsoft, a software company with its roots in this exact type of software and thousand of companies with piles of MS-specific macros and scripts and processes they've been working with since the 90s.

Half-assing it is not going to work, even if they have a free tier available.

I use Google Drive regularly for personal documents, and even for my one-person business, but I wouldn't dream of entrenching myself in it in such a way that operations could be disrupted if they decide to switch the servers off next week with two days warning.

Search isn't going away. Maps isn't going away. But everything else Google is subject to a shut off at any second. Gmail isn't going away either, but your specific account could, with no recourse or appeal or access to your data.

The question we should all be asking at the release of ANY new Google feature shouldn't be "does Google have the engineering talent to make this good?". Of course they do. If Google wanted to start making space rockets tomorrow they could. The right question is "does Google have incentive in the form of advertising revenue to keep working on this?"

I predict this is another feature that has already been abandoned as of this writing, with no further updates to come.

Such a cynical comment. G Suite is a premium product for business and enterprise. It isn't going anywhere.

Microsoft Flow is a really powerful - in terms of advanced capabilities it offers. If you're bought into the Office 365 ecosystem - the add-ins to Teams, Excel and SharePoint are really nifty. You can even run a "flow" over row data in Excel. I personally use this to file and track bugs - saves so much time for me.

It also has capabilities that allows you to connect to any REST API - look up Custom Connectors.

Finally, if you don't have Office 365, you can sign up for a free account using your personal Outlook / Microsoft account to test the waters.

Disclaimer: I work on Microsoft Flow and am very excited to see it here on YC.

/me is one of the minions from team "Eye of Sauron". However I'm not stuck in this tower.

I'm torn between two worlds. One side applauds the grass roots based solutions and the JFDI attitude. The other side is concerned that these solutions becomes widely used, de facto production, and problems upstream ends up breaking the output. On error, hopefully fails loudly but subtle problems could creep in. If the reports are consumed by other automation, the problem spreads rapidly.

Ideally the IT department would take a step back, assess what the users (you the stakeholder) needs are, and provide the solutions. Better Agile.

Using the successes to drive more development and operations budget is the way to go.

The assumption that 'a byte is eight bits' is less specific than 'a character is one byte is eight bits' but I think captures it pretty well and affects at least all the people who are affected by RTL writing, I would think.

If anything, the one character -> eight bits problem was so large huge amounts of work has been put into developing and using libraries that abstract the representation of text away from byte streams.