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Microsoft's low-code strategy paints a target on UIPath and other RPA companies

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Re: Microsoft's low-code strategy paints a target on UIPath and other RPA companies

#121

Post by Asymmetryk »

asdfman123 wrote: post #14
MattGaiser wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think low code works for smaller more routine projects where hiring devs is just not all that feasible.

A lot of people stuck in places like, say, the accounting department have the soul of a dev. They like technology and want to automate things. And often times when they do that, they actually improve their departments quite a bit with stuff like VBA and Access projects (as uncool as they may seem to some). It works because "real" programming environments have learning curves that are hard to tackle if you have a day…

if I may be so bold ( and presumptuous my suggestion is of any value) I wondered if your friend would like the risk and structured securities aspects of actuarial catastrophe risk markets. This pretty much has everything in it, from chaos theory to the statistics of the cadence of liabilities upon the different kinds of financial engineering structure that are used to distribute * the liability and fund the most difficult to reinsure policies in the capital markets.

edit : * and package, according to a tremendous variety of fiscal requirements and risk appetites. And naturally covering the most extreme conditions liability payments is historically a fascinating insight into how we developed our world across and binding together such tenuous links.

Re: Microsoft's low-code strategy paints a target on UIPath and other RPA companies

#122

Post by WorldMaker »

ajcp wrote: post #48
jrochkind1 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I think MSFT also gets their own messaging wrong. Or, is it possible MSFT knows that when selling to "enterprise", it works a lot better to say you've got a better version of "thing they know", instead of a brand new thing that will replace "thing they know".

It very well could be. I think where MSFT gets mixed up is that they are obsessed with their products being able to solve *everyone's* use-case. Which means if they're talking to the business then it's a friendly "Low-Code" platform that any citizen developer can use. However, when they're talking to IT it's an amazing CI/CD tool for developing powerful enterprise applications! What's something that corporate IT is o…

> What's something that corporate IT is obsessed with? Making sure the business isn't creating shadow IT and developing enterprise applications.

Though with Power Apps and Power BI all of that starts showing up on IT's dashboards (Azure Portal; Microsoft 365). Microsoft hasn't been great about messaging that, but unlike hidden Excel files in random network shares or VB+Access apps in PCs in cupboards, that "amazing CI/CD tool for enterprise applications" also means that it can't just live in the shadows and will get seen by IT.

If anything, I've seen "citizen developers" turn away from Power BI/Power Apps precisely because their M365/Azure admins are too micro-managing to use the tools for what they were intended for and such people just go back to that Excel+VBA macros on a network share in a broom closet.

Which yes, gets back to Microsoft is trying too hard to meet everyone's use case and in forcing Power BI/Power Apps into M365/Azure they've trapped out some of the "I just need to get stuff done" "citizen devs" because some IT departments are so scared of shadows that they are preemptively blocking one of the tools they could use to keep an eye on it better. It's a lovely irony.

Re: Microsoft's low-code strategy paints a target on UIPath and other RPA companies

#123

Post by filoeleven »

ajcp wrote: post #104
filoeleven wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RPA is a financial services buzzword right now. I’ve worked on an RPA library that manipulates a web application…which the company already provided full API access to. The RPA library requires those working with it to examine the page HTML in order to hook into it, since it’s highly dynamic: you have to see what form fields are available and their internal IDs in order to interact with them. Meanwhile, the API layer…

Stories like this make me sad :(

Oh, me too. I wrote a whole rant and erased it before submitting the comment because I judged it to be unhelpful.

Re: Microsoft's low-code strategy paints a target on UIPath and other RPA companies

#124

Post by bigger_cheese »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #16
dnndev wrote: post #6

This is addressing a market. I have seen it first hand more than once. Highly driven and competent individuals that are not programmers for whatever reason and that create a monstrosity that works (using some low code solution). It’s ugly and buggy but gets a job done. This works for as long as they don’t hit a technical limitation then call devs like myself in to replace it. It was a great phase 1 and made money. Th…

Yes, no-code solutions almost always become ugly, buggy, monstrosities, and there are technical limits that mean it needs wholesale replacement, but pragmatically I too have seen them getting jobs done. I'd also wager it will not cost more to rewrite it, especially if you deeply discount the non-developer resources that were used to create it (often salaried employees' time, and even then those individuals likely cam…

In the last 6 Months my workplace has started heavily using Power Apps. The first impression I got was 'holy crap, this is MS Access on steroids'. My workplace heavily(ab)used Access in the 90's and we got bitten very badly when support for Access was discontinued. We also had a lot of VB6 code which was similarly orphaned.

In the mid 2000's someone in our IT department decided all new business apps were to be written in Java I believe this decision was made partially as a reaction to what happened with Access and VB6. The result was everything stagnated our in house apps became massively bloated, buggy and almost no one did anything 'to fix things. Any changes had to go through external contractors because no one knew Java or how to support these apps. If they had mandated Python like the post I'm replying to suggested I am sure the results would have been the same. Probably worse because harder to find cheap contractors to work on business apps in Python.

You are not going to get HR people, you are not going to get Finance Accountants, you are not going to get commercial team or legal to learn a full on programming language. That is why these products have such a niche in large Enterprise orgs.

Yes you get buggy monstrosities but you can also very rapidly develop working tools that solve real business problems.

I think what makes Power Apps attractive is the whole Azure ecosystem Microsoft have built around it. There is a whole suite of tools that all talk to the same common backends, Power Automate, Azure Databricks, Azure ML, Power BI, Power Apps etc. From what I've experienced as all of this stuff has been rapidly rolled out across my org is it all "just works" and seemingly solves real problems.

My real fear is that 5 years down the line it will have all be abandoned and we'll be left with MS Access 2.0 and a bunched of orphaned unsupported apps again. I hope Microsoft have learned from what happened with Access but at the moment it remains to be seen.

Re: Microsoft's low-code strategy paints a target on UIPath and other RPA companies

#125

Post by WorldMaker »

thrower123 wrote: post #77
m12k wrote: post #37

I'm currently porting a slackbot to Teams. Even with the backend logic and architecture mostly re-usable, the Teams bot is already taking at least 3x as long to code, simply because their documentation is so obscure. It feels like detective work, correlating data from 4 different tangentially related sources (AzureAD, app authorization flows, Graph, BotFramework). I've never had so many tabs open at once in my life.…

Bot Framework is horrible. It's the most ridiculous IM platform I've built anything for, and I've covered a good bit of the spectrum. They really need to expose a full-featured API for Teams, something at least as powerful as what you used to be able to do with the UCMA SDK for Lync/SfB. I've given up on anything ever getting exposed through Graph API in a timely manner. It took two or three years before you could ge…

Bot Framework was a good idea: one framework to write a bot for multiple IM platforms at once. But of course it immediately suffered the exact problems you would expect: lowest common denominator features, older target platforms falling into disrepair, new platforms never getting official support, etc.

Using Bot Framework to write just for a Teams bot is broken before you start. Using it to support both your Teams and Slack integrations sounds nice on paper, but probably doesn't work in theory as soon as you need platform specific features or do something "advanced". You still can't use Bot Framework with Discord.

I liked the theory behind Bot Framework, but the practical reality has so far been mostly a disappointment.

Re: Microsoft's low-code strategy paints a target on UIPath and other RPA companies

#126

Post by WorldMaker »

jerf wrote: post #25
omk wrote: post #7

If this works, Microsoft is going to hit a long-term retention jackpot. Low-code ecosystems are sticky and excel in ARR as their model is usually consumption based. Moving away costs companies millions. Every employee is automating their work on this platform. I working with a consulting firm and one of our customers (+50,000 employees) has onboarded power-platform for every individual to automate their work. If ever…

I don't know if they're pursuing this, but Microsoft also has the opportunity to create low-code solutions that more gracefully transition into conventional solutions, because unlike a pure-low-code play, that doesn't have to mean they are losing a customer. They aren't incentivized to lock you in to low code as long as one way or another you pay Microsoft on the way out, too, via either being in the conventional Mic…

That's very much Microsoft's goal here. It's a lot of why they started pushing everyone to stop calling it "No Code" and moved to the name "Low Code".

At BUILD they released some of the first big VS Code plugins for some of the Low Code systems. (Power Apps is represented mostly as a lot of YAML files, if you were curious.) Most of the Low Code systems already use Azure CI/CD and git under the hood and editing Low Code projects in VS Code and VS seems easy enough for "conventional" developers.

Re: Microsoft's low-code strategy paints a target on UIPath and other RPA companies

#127

Post by WorldMaker »

akudha wrote: post #18
omk wrote: post #7

If this works, Microsoft is going to hit a long-term retention jackpot. Low-code ecosystems are sticky and excel in ARR as their model is usually consumption based. Moving away costs companies millions. Every employee is automating their work on this platform. I working with a consulting firm and one of our customers (+50,000 employees) has onboarded power-platform for every individual to automate their work. If ever…

I think it will work, especially if Microsoft can also build self hosted version of some of these tools. There is a huge market for such tools (look at how much attention self hosted Airtable alternatives are getting). Between self/cloud hosted versions, their sales machine and deep integrations, Microsoft has a huge advantage over Google and Amazon.

At BUILD this year Microsoft announced Azure Arc which runs on any Kubernetes cluster (including ones you spin up on AWS, GCP, or a laptop on a desk somewhere) and supports running a surprising number of Azure services already (Azure App Services, Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, and supposedly growing). Administration can happen in the regular Azure Portal and it just looks like you are deploying to a custom datacenter region in the Portal.

It's really slick. It's also pretty obvious that many of the services they've focused on at first are some of the underlying foundations of their Low Code efforts, so I would be surprised if Power Apps and Power BI also eventually wind up on that list of Azure Arc supported.

Azure Arc seems like a really interesting "compromise" on "self-hosted" (depending of course, on which reasons you have to need "self-hosting").

(Azure also has Azure Stack which is the entirely self-hosted datacenter version too. I don't think that yet supports these Low Code tools yet either, but it's probably even closer to having the foundations for that in place.)

Re: Microsoft's low-code strategy paints a target on UIPath and other RPA companies

#128

Post by ffhhj »

geonic wrote: post #111
ARandomerDude wrote: post #57

The most mind-blowing part of the article was the Teams vs Slack screenshot. https://res.infoq.com/articles/cloud-vendors-low-code/en/res...

I‘m not a Microsoft user, haven’t been for over ten years. Recently I had to install and register for Teams at work. I haven’t seen an application as clunky and messy as this in a long time. Nothing in its UI makes any sense to me. On top of that the login process is extremely wonky and unstable. To me this Microsoft doing again what it does best. Pushing some crappy software into the market by leveraging its market…

Then feel fortunate if you don't have to install also Skype and Outlook.

Re: Microsoft's low-code strategy paints a target on UIPath and other RPA companies

#129

Post by fartcannon »

Tarucho wrote: post #56

The article looks like a paid ad in disguise.

It probably is. I already posted a link to it in another comment, but to reiterate, Microsoft's CEO admitted to 'working on' hacker news specifically to sway opinions on Azure. Not much of a stretch to assume they do that for other projects, too.

To quote, "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..." https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-201...

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