Tables: Tracking work for teams • Hacker News Board

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#221

Post by haltingproblem » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 6:11 PM UTC

samblr wrote: post #171

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.

It takes Google several years to wakeup, rub their eyes, brew some coffee, code it up and deploy it. You will be amazed how hard it is to not be lulled by the sweet sound of tens of billions in revenue adsense/adwords spews out every year. Why bother with anything else?

Google's political economy is groups building new products not to build new revenue streams but to claim larger bonuses of the ad-revenue pie. Limited shelf life products and their users are just cannon fodder in that game.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#222

Post by msapaydin » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 6:11 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #193

As a product, this looks super-cool. However, I've got to be honest: while I'd play around with it while it's part of Area 120, there's no way I'd use it in a business until it officially became part of G Suite, as a core service . If Keep and Tasks are core services, then this needs to be too. That becomes a guarantee that it'll stick around basically forever. So it's very exciting to see Google launch something lik…

openai gpt-3 beta private api is also becoming not free soon.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#223

Post by desireco42 » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

mdoms wrote: post #210

Folks I'm just getting word that they're cancelling this product.

Funny. They totally deserve this btw. They will need to provide additional assurances for products. I agree we could use more assurances on product life.

It is good product that can grow if it garners sufficient interest. I hope it does.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#224

Post by pdx_flyer » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 6:16 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #193

As a product, this looks super-cool. However, I've got to be honest: while I'd play around with it while it's part of Area 120, there's no way I'd use it in a business until it officially became part of G Suite, as a core service . If Keep and Tasks are core services, then this needs to be too. That becomes a guarantee that it'll stick around basically forever. So it's very exciting to see Google launch something lik…

Exactly. Until it's part of the suite it doesn't have Google's full backing and no guarantee that they won't kill it.

I use Keep to share lists with my spouse but even that I don't put anything important into because it could go away as quickly as it showed up.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#225

Post by human_error » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 6:19 PM UTC

"At Area 120, we work on 20% projects 100% of the time."

So this is some people's pet project that has no backing from Google. Given Google kills products (whose full time jobs) at any time, I wouldn't be surprised Google kills Tables before I finish this sentence.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#226

Post by xmprt » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 6:21 PM UTC

drej wrote: post #106

This looks very similar to Notion ( https://www.notion.so/ ). The one big difference being that I believe Notion will outlive Tables - especially as Tables is already touted as an incubated project.

Looks almost identical except that Notion doesn't support bot actions. Once Notion builds an API and has support for things like IFTTT then we'll see it become even more powerful than it is today.

But I was surprised to find relatively basic features (like find/replace in page or a shortcut to find in table) missing so hopefully Notion's team will get around to implementing those soon.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#227

Post by forgotmypw17 » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #119

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is often claimed, but more often than not, data provided by export features, and not just Google's, are in a format which makes it useless to non-programmers.

That's going to be the common case; without knowing the end-target application, most data formats we would pick at random are useless to non-programmers. Even JSON is too complex for non-programmers.

Plaintext would not be too complex for non-programmers.

Coupled with in-file tokens, it makes for an easy format to export into anything.

That's why I am using it as the base format for my forum application.

At any time, the entire forum content can be exported into plaintext, which is readable by most users on most platforms (except iOS)

And also can be re-imported into just about anything with a quick Perl script.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#228

Post by res0nat0r » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

cpeterso wrote: post #151

res0nat0r wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OTOH, Google doesn’t like to invest big money in businesses that aren’t on track to be big. From just nine months ago: “Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21815260

That is the exact thread I have a comment in from ~9 months ago. Anyone thinking that Google is going to shut down 24 physical datacenter regions spread all around the world if they're not #1 in the cloud market in 3 years is insane. The cloud market is multi billion dollar business and is only going to continue growing (even moreso now in the last ~9 months thanks to COVID). It isn't a free RSS aggregator that isn't maintained anymore and thus going to be sundowned.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#229

Post by gerash » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 6:27 PM UTC

prlambert wrote: post #173

gerash wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

IMO it's still not clear from a single glance. Either no Google logo anywhere near experimental stuff or a super visible uniform "Beta/Experimental" logo as long as a product has no long term commitment.

I'd say they should use the same logo whether it's an area120 project, an experimental chrome extension from YT team, some research experiment, some VR experimental app, etc.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#230

Post by megous » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 6:31 PM UTC

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #117

shadowgovt wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google Tables has no migration tool or system for users to export their data angering some users. Weird. Last I checked, even when deprecations happen, the data is accessible via Takeout.

This is often claimed, but more often than not, data provided by export features, and not just Google's, are in a format which makes it useless to non-programmers.

Good. I still remember when Facebook export was some shitty useless html garbage file, that didn't even include post types, or names of other people, or sensible structure (just a soup of
tags), or entity IDs, and was basically useless for about anything.

These days exports are at least usable, so that you can hire a programmer to make something useful out of it, if you need.

I've already helped people make tools to create automated summaries for counting billable hours for language lessons taught over skype or messanger, which was only possible thanks to these exports finally being in some processable format, with enough metadata included.

It's not either or though. Services can export in both nice usable formats, and html garbage that is nice to look at but useless for anything else.