Tables: Tracking work for teams • Hacker News Board

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#361

Post by carliny » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 9:57 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #354

carliny wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey there! Tables PM here -- thanks for writing an honest opinion about what factors you're considering before wanting to use it for a business; I really appreciate that feedback and it's very helpful for us to hear. I know our team would love to have people try Tables for lightweight work tracking use cases, even if it's not for a mission-critical business need. At the end of the day, we want Tables to help people a…

Well nice job carliny in launching it, well done! And good luck. I could see a lot of small groups adopting this -- college extracurricular groups, a team at a church, friends organizing a short film -- and if you're focusing on usage metrics, that whole universe could prove to be far larger than the business market, at least before it's included in G Suite. Think of how many people use Forms+Sheets for that stuff ri…

Thanks, crazygringo! Appreciate the kind words.

Absolutely, we're really hoping that Tables can be great for all those smaller groups and use cases as well. The feedback on your impressions of the landing page is really helpful; I'll take that to the team and see if we can improve on that.

For some context on the tiers, I agree that storage is becoming a commodity and may not be something to gate on too heavily. For some quick insight, we did an analysis and the vast majority of lightweight work trackers (not for a serious business use case) had far below 1000 rows/records in them, so we left it with that limit to mitigate abuse, and then give 10x in the next tier (plus, we only charge for a single license, not by # of collaborators). That said, your point about making it easier for people to just jump in and get started is very valid. Thanks for giving me and the team some food for thought, we'll noodle on this and see how we can improve the messaging! :)

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#362

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 10:08 PM UTC

carliny wrote: post #312

jbm wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I considered that but I'm in Canada. There is someone in every organization asking to minimize potential legal liability. It's a bit sad that the Chicken Littles have won again.

Hey jbm, Tables PM here, your comment definitely resonated with me. Fun fact: I'm Canadian! :P On your point though: as my own opinion, there's some very smart people here trying to make sure we're doing things in a safe way that protects both our users and our team, and so sometimes we're asked to start small. As a result, we're doing what we can to offer something useful for people and businesses during these covid…

[deleted]

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#363

Post by UrSuchAGenius » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 10:09 PM UTC

carliny wrote: post #336

jbm wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be very interested to hear more about why, specifically, Canadians (like you and me) are seen as potentially unsafe users. (Regardless of that, congratulations on your launch and good luck!)

Thanks! Very much appreciate the kind words. :) Yeah, to give you my perspective on this for a second: the reality is that the rules for how we work with and protect user data continues to evolve and become more nuanced with the different regulations from different countries. Not to mention, taking payments in different countries and currencies has a lot of implications! For every country we release to, there's a bun…

Then only allow unpaid users eveywhere else until you sort that out and limit the number of users instead of being US-only.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#364

Post by catmanjan » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 11:08 PM UTC

ako wrote: post #348

catmanjan wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're thinking of things in terms of how they function rather than the value they provide - from a business value perspective COTS and low-code are identical, its just that low-code used to be GUI desktop apps, now they're GUI web apps.

It's much more than gui web apps, it also includes native mobile apps, headless services, integrations, etc. And from a business value they're very different: COTS you do not want to modify/adapt to your busines, otherwise you get problems upgrading, etc. Low-code is often used to innovate and differentiate, as a programming layer to quickly change COTS to your business needs. Disclaimer: working for a low-code vendo…

>COTS you do not want to modify/adapt to your busines

This is redefining a term after the fact to suit marketing needs of the new term - with the except of bespoke solutions, it has always been possible to adapt COTS products - have you not seen SAP? Dynamics? Even Excel is COTS

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#365

Post by carliny » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 12:09 AM UTC

Terretta wrote: post #353

carliny wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey there! Tables PM here -- thanks for writing an honest opinion about what factors you're considering before wanting to use it for a business; I really appreciate that feedback and it's very helpful for us to hear. I know our team would love to have people try Tables for lightweight work tracking use cases, even if it's not for a mission-critical business need. At the end of the day, we want Tables to help people a…

How are you addressing business data compliance? A kanban central like this essentially contains a snapshot of the company and its direction, “outside”. RBAC w/ segregation of duties on the admin side and least privilege assurances, audit trails, SOC2, HIPAA, etc. etc... ?

Hey Terretta, great question. Tables is already built on standard Google infrastructure so we have many of the default security and privacy protections built in.

From a user-facing standpoint: Tables is really geared towards being more user-friendly than the traditional DBA type tools, so the sharing model aligns more closely with Google Drive, and offer similar permissioning roles like "Editor", "Commenter", and an additional "Writer" role for collaborators who should be able to edit the rows, but not the table schema itself. We also have table and row-level change history baked in, and while we don't specifically offer an audit trail within the app, users can implement a version of that themselves using our bots. We're also working to support the ability to use bots to essentially automate GDPR compliance, by having bots that will automatically delete table rows that are >X days old.

From a customer-to-Google standpoint: we are very serious about your data privacy and security. We're not currently rubberstamped for HIPAA/SOC2, but we're already in the process of going through the internal reviews for FEDRAMP and HIPAA compliance. We do not at this time have advanced enterprise admin controls for customers, but it's absolutely coming in the future (we are only 1-day old to the public :).

We're not going to have all the angles covered, but we're working towards it!

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#366

Post by carliny » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 12:13 AM UTC

UrSuchAGenius wrote: post #363

carliny wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Very much appreciate the kind words. :) Yeah, to give you my perspective on this for a second: the reality is that the rules for how we work with and protect user data continues to evolve and become more nuanced with the different regulations from different countries. Not to mention, taking payments in different countries and currencies has a lot of implications! For every country we release to, there's a bun…

Then only allow unpaid users eveywhere else until you sort that out and limit the number of users instead of being US-only.

Hey there, that would certainly simplify the aspect of payment, but to be clear, there are also data governance rules that vary by country, irrespective of whether we're collecting payment or not. We definitely considered that option as well, but ended up going down this path for now. We hope we'll be able to expand access before too long though!

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#367

Post by dano » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 1:57 AM UTC

carliny wrote: post #346

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…

Hey there! Tables PM here -- thanks for writing an honest opinion about what factors you're considering before wanting to use it for a business; I really appreciate that feedback and it's very helpful for us to hear. I know our team would love to have people try Tables for lightweight work tracking use cases, even if it's not for a mission-critical business need. At the end of the day, we want Tables to help people a…

When will Tables be added to G-Suite as a core product? Time frame? Gating factors?

Adopting a new workflow and project process is a massive investment in data conversion, adoption, training, and internal politics. For those reasons, my teams would need to know to a high degree of certainty that our efforts will be rewarded with a long term, well supported service.

Congrats on launching and I'll be watching to see how things go for this product.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#368

Post by ako » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 5:18 AM UTC

catmanjan wrote: post #364

ako wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's much more than gui web apps, it also includes native mobile apps, headless services, integrations, etc. And from a business value they're very different: COTS you do not want to modify/adapt to your busines, otherwise you get problems upgrading, etc. Low-code is often used to innovate and differentiate, as a programming layer to quickly change COTS to your business needs. Disclaimer: working for a low-code vendo…

>COTS you do not want to modify/adapt to your busines This is redefining a term after the fact to suit marketing needs of the new term - with the except of bespoke solutions, it has always been possible to adapt COTS products - have you not seen SAP? Dynamics? Even Excel is COTS

Yes you can modify SAP, but upgrading then becomes very hard. Many companies are stuck at old versions of SAP because upgrading it, including migrating all the customizations, is very expensive and takes a lot of time.

I would consider Excel a no-code/low-code (pretty complex macros in there + vba) platform.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#369

Post by dannyw » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 1:02 PM UTC

gogopuppygogo wrote: post #159

hiei wrote: post #23

Back in the day I would definitely be one of those early Google adopters, just to try the product. I don't bother anymore

Sam here. Now, I don’t try a Google product until some multi billion dollar startup that GV has invested into uses that product.

You know what would help, Google? Slightly incentives early adopters somewhat, with perks in the same product if you sign up early enough.

Google Apps (precursor to G Suite) effectively did that. Free plan was 100 users at first. Maybe even higher. Then it got reduced to 15 or something. Then 5. Then they removed the free plan, for new signups.

I am pretty happy to be on a 100 user plan, I know I would easily pay $15-25/month for a few containersed Google accounts with my own domain names.

But because I signed up early as a Google adopter, and I get a little discount in a way. That's cool, and made me happy to be an early adopter.

You should try to do the same for new products. Maybe for the first adopters, offer them 10 paid seats for lifetime of their account, for free.

The future revenue cost is small because early adopters are just viral advocates (you want them!); and the developer/techie market can set trends.

Re: Tables: Tracking work for teams

#370

Post by manigandham » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 8:36 PM UTC

haltingproblem wrote: post #328

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…

Google's internal politics and business goals are well aligned for their employees . Adsense/Adwords spews tens of billions of dollars in profits every year. Google's political economy incentivizes groups to build new products not for their revenue streams but to claim larger bonuses of the ad-revenue pie. The users who buy into these "new" products are just cannon fodder in that game. Remember Google+? Vic Gundotra…

I agree with the first part, however Microsoft has been competing extremely well and has released very good products through both acquisitions and internal development.