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Tables: Tracking work for teams

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Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#141

Post by zentiggr »

res0nat0r wrote: post #102
atarian wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opposite end of this spectrum is a company supporting far too many different properties like Yahoo did. How do you strike the right balance?

Most of it is just the HN echo chamber. Folks commenting that GCP my be shut down because it doesn't make as much money as Azure, totally oblivious to the fact that Google has billions invested in physical buildings and hardware being hammered on and built out around the world as we speak, just shows that folks here are out of the loop on this type of thing.

Aside from an easily dismissed hardware-backed GCP case, Google _does_ have a long history of useful and interesting ideas that launch, gain some users, look really useful if some effort is put into it, and get dropped instead. Even if some solid use cases are building.

I'm going to look at this idea, see what it might be able to do, and look at whether there's another alternative that would be likelier to survive.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#142

Post by jfoster »

mattkevan wrote: post #130
danpalmer wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit of an over-used joke. Given this is explicitly being launched under "Area 120", "Google's workshop for experimental products", I think it's fair to let them ship things, try things out, see what works, and close what doesn't.

Fair point, but why should anyone bother investing time and effort into using the thing if it's just an experiment? Certainly not going to shift my team or multiple teams onto it if I can't trust it's going to be there tomorrow.

Google: Hey users, please commit your teams & projects to our new shiny product!

Users: Hey Google, please commit to supporting your new shiny product for the long-haul!

Stalemate. Google did this to themselves.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#143

Post by lowlevel »

danpalmer wrote: post #128
burtonator wrote: post #35

PRESS RELEASE Sept 22, 2021. Google Announces that Google Tables will be sunset and all users will have to migrate away by Sept 23, 2021. "Google Tables was a great experiment but we're migrating to Google Tracker - a better version of Google Tables designed for power users." said Dep Re. Kated, VP of Engineering at Google. Google Tables has no migration tool or system for users to export their data angering some use…

This is a bit of an over-used joke. Given this is explicitly being launched under "Area 120", "Google's workshop for experimental products", I think it's fair to let them ship things, try things out, see what works, and close what doesn't.

No joke. We have company policy now to not use google for anything.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#144

Post by foobiekr »

delecti wrote: post #104
puranjay wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Docs and Sheets already feels like abandonedware. I haven't seen any substantial changes in years.

I can't imagine what additional features the overwhelming majority of people need out of a word processor or spreadsheet software.

Docs still can't handle large documents with a long edit history. It slows to a crawl. This has been an issue since at least 2013.

We are talking about document sizes that Word for Windows 95 could handle.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#145

Post by danpalmer »

mattkevan wrote: post #130
danpalmer wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit of an over-used joke. Given this is explicitly being launched under "Area 120", "Google's workshop for experimental products", I think it's fair to let them ship things, try things out, see what works, and close what doesn't.

Fair point, but why should anyone bother investing time and effort into using the thing if it's just an experiment? Certainly not going to shift my team or multiple teams onto it if I can't trust it's going to be there tomorrow.

If you're starting a new team today, or a hobby project, or you have very little movement cost and low risk choosing a new service, then maybe you read this page, see a thing that this solves that has frustrated you about a previous tool, and you go for it. That's why a customer might choose it.

That's winning an early customer, that's proving product/market fit, that's progress. That's why Google would do this.

The marketing material pitches it as a much bigger deal, but then would anyone sign up if it didn't? There's a minimum quality bar that many people expect before signing up, and from a known entity like Google that's likely a much higher bar.

I almost wonder if they're making problems for themselves by naming it under the Google brand? Being completely separate they'd be able to fail faster, ship something lower quality that still proved product/market fit, etc. Area 120 seems to be their attempt to create this space, but I'm undecided on how well I think it will work.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#146

Post by athenot »

This looks a lot like a SmartSheet clone.

The other comments about viability and long term support of Google's experimental products are very valid. But if it can help light up a fire under SmartSheet to improve their interface, that's not a bad outcome.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#147

Post by foobiekr »

uponcoffee wrote: post #95
virgilp wrote: post #49

What surprises me, more than the ton of comments about Google's credibility, is that I suspect nobody even tried to get more than a superficial understanding of what the product is supposed to do and what differentiates it. Surely I can't be the first one to notice that you can't even find out what this product does? The value proposition is a series of images, but you can't look at any one image & absorb the details…

It seems to be UI/UX for creating//editing//managing databases and interacting with them for non-programmers. Paraphrasing the video: Like sheets, but with structured data (columns define data types with relationships) and complex actions/triggers via bots. Per your original comment, given Google's track record with customer performance//services being dead on arrival, I can imagine few here are interested in learnin…

It's interesting that it seems to be aimed at less technical users. Perhaps the google teams executing the POD [1] process now perceive that they have exhausted the pool of credulous technical users and are now trying to mine a new audience.

[1] promo-oriented development

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#148

Post by toomuchtodo »

prlambert wrote: post #76
Just1689 wrote: post #15

What a useful app. Reminds me of Airtable in some ways. I enjoy a good flexible table app any day. We're all tired of the obligatory "I wonder how long before Google deprecates this...;)" but I wonder if Google would get better adoption if they explicitly published what would be needed for them not to drop the product... 1M monthly users? 3M? ...xM? or that when a project actually reaches that point.

[Disclosure I work at Google Area 120 and would be partly responsible for this type of decision] This is a really helpful comment and I like the nod to transparency. Thank you! Not sure we could get quite so concrete publicly (there are lots of unknowns and wouldn't want to make commitments we can't keep), but aligning goals between the business, team, and users/customers is a great idea and something we can improve…

Could Google not commit to open sourcing projects in a maintainable way (public repos, k8s support versus just Borg, which no one has access to) and guarantee data export functionality as part of Takeout? This would significantly derisk attempting to use a fledgling Google service for end users.

Definitely not a resourcing issue, entirely an organizational culture and philosophy decision to be made.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#149

Post by jfoster »

atarian wrote: post #51
kennyadam wrote: post #10

You know Google has a serious credibility problem when half or more of the comments on tech sites covering product launches are questioning when Google will decide to randomly pull the plug.

The opposite end of this spectrum is a company supporting far too many different properties like Yahoo did. How do you strike the right balance?

Well there's two things to say about that:

1. Some of the things they launch they probably shouldn't be launching because they have next to no chance of ever being a meaningful business for Google. (eg. Google Helpouts)

2. Some of the things they launch are attempts to get into a particular area and Google's interest in that area lasts longer than their interest in whatever they initially launched. Chat is probably the best example of this; Google Talk, Hangouts, heck, I don't even know what it's called now! In such cases Google should be more disciplined about supporting whatever it is they've launched. Re-brand & iterate as much as they want, but never leave customers hanging.

I think if Google followed these two rules they would be sunsetting a lot less stuff. They might still need to retire the odd product/service, but at least they wouldn't be doing it so much that customers doubt every single launch.

Their current approach hasn't been working well for their customers, but it's actually going to begin affecting their customers less and affect Google more. Who in their right mind would put any medium/long term stock into Tables, for example? Customers no longer affected. Now Google can't launch a service that the market will take seriously.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#150

Post by datasert »

bram2w wrote: post #123

I see a lot of comments about people who are worried that Google might shutdown the service entirely and I agree with your concerns. The last months we have seen a lot of giants building their own database spreadsheet like hybrid, Google Tables, Microsoft Lists and Amazon Honeycode. Tools like these contain your most important data and you want to have freedom, security and independence as they can be an important pa…

Your website design looks very nice. What css/ui framework did you make use of it?
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