Strangely, why does a company like Google, wakes up so late when Airtable hits Series-D and not Series-A/B/C ?
Looks like its straight forward product for somebody who makes google spreadsheets.
Tables: Tracking work for teams
171–180 of 375 posts
Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams
#172My gut reaction: it looks great! Also, there is no way I’d use it unless Google committed to not killing it off for at least five years. I don’t mind trying experimental personal tools, but I really don’t want to get a whole team of people reliant on this thing, just to see it get cancelled like the hundreds of other projects Google has killed over the years. A paid support option would be nice too - I think I saw so…
https://cloud.google.com/support It's not ANY, but it's all GSuite/GCP products.
Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams
#173What 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.
This is an experimental project obviously and has that Area120 tag but I think there should be a uniform experimental logo/icon across all of Google products for any projects which is provided as is with no upfront commitment to long term support or sustainability. Once the distinction between products with long-term commitment and experimental products is super clear with a uniform icon/logo then there'll be less di…
Just to confirm, the Area 120 labelling is meant to do exactly that. Area 120 projects do not have long-term commitments, explicitly. But the goal is for the successful ones to graduate to be a fully supported Google product and gain those commitments at that time (we have a number of examples of that happening).
Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams
#174Does anyone feels looking at Google's products lately that there's something tremendously wrong with the organization. I'm not talking about just dropping features but just quality of implementation and missing things that people should get fed up and do something during development. Like hangout > chat, let's drop the existing feature of read receipt that is even more important in the remote/work world in a product…
Let's admit it.
Google is on its way to become the new ____.
IBM ?
Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams
#175My gut reaction: it looks great! Also, there is no way I’d use it unless Google committed to not killing it off for at least five years. I don’t mind trying experimental personal tools, but I really don’t want to get a whole team of people reliant on this thing, just to see it get cancelled like the hundreds of other projects Google has killed over the years. A paid support option would be nice too - I think I saw so…
One easy way to make a successful startup is to copy something Google is doing completely, and then wait for them to kill it off because it doesn't make enough profit for them to be worthwhile.
Then you soak up all the customers who still wanted it.
Works damn near every time.
Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams
#176My gut reaction: it looks great! Also, there is no way I’d use it unless Google committed to not killing it off for at least five years. I don’t mind trying experimental personal tools, but I really don’t want to get a whole team of people reliant on this thing, just to see it get cancelled like the hundreds of other projects Google has killed over the years. A paid support option would be nice too - I think I saw so…
Is it even remotely possible that Google would sell discontinued products to other entities, e.g. raise money to buy Wave as a separate company or something like that?
Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams
#177What 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…
I don't trust Google's commitment on maintaining this seemingly mid-size project. So I won't invest my time considering it.
Maybe we should just start doing what Google does, copy their products and all use that instead.
Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
[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…
Are all these comments about the near and inevitable death of your new product at all soul-crushing? I'm a stranger on the internet and even I can feel the burn. Good luck.
As a Googler, I'd just say it's a boring meme that shows little thought and just wastes time actually getting to interesting discussion here. It's almost akin to "first" from the old days of Slashdot or the race to mention generics whenever anything related to Go comes up.
Products come and products go, this is not unique to Google. Killed By Google is cited as some sort of proof, but that goes back to _2003_, and does nothing to talk about whether the product was replaced with something new that users were transitioned to.
Then you have a company like Microsoft that keeps things around in perpetuity, but sometimes to the chagrin of users who want new features added or you get incongruent UX (you can still find plenty of very old apps in Windows 10). And this is fine too, but it's not a meme and so never comes up.
Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams
#179I 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…
Seatable[0] is another alternative which is mostly open source, following a licensing similar to MongoDB for their server if I recall correctly.
They're now on version 1.3, not sure if they're fully stable yet but it's a viable self-hosted alternative.
Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's not noise In terms of HN’s overt purpose, it is. > it's a valid market signal Every expression of anyone's reaction to a brand is “valid market signal” on the level that that is true of this, but that doesn't stop most of that from being noise in an HN comment thread. > So I'll side with automatically appending one such comment in every Google thread until their behavior visibly changes. Such an automated comm…
If HN is interested in the success/failure of products & services, product-market fit and such, then what Google have done to themselves is a fascinating phenomenon. In the past, many companies have had "not great" reputations for supporting products, but surely Google have taken it to level not seen before. The fact that pretty much all of their products live in the cloud rather than being software that can continue…
> If HN is interested in the success/failure of products & services, product-market fit and such, then what Google have done to themselves is a fascinating phenomenon.
Sure, that's a reason discussion of the phenomenon is appropriate for HN, just as discussion of AI-driven automated spamming of message boards as a marketing technique might be. (Though, even then, not an appropriate thing to derail every thread in which a Google product is the subject into.)
OTOH, that doesn't make the phenomenon itself appropriate for HN, in any place.