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Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)

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Re: Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)

#141

Post by hoistbypetard »

d3w4s9 wrote: post #121

This is not the first product of the kind and won't be the last one. And they look great in theory but get complicated and very confusing and ultimately never find their place. People don't need an integrated tool that does everything. People need a few very good tools that work well with each other. Confluence/Jira is such an example, and to some extent Google's suite and Microsoft's, plus a few more. Unless you can…

It surely isn't. Before everything had to be online, you had Microsoft Works, AppleWorks, BeagleWorks, Symantec Works, Lotus Works, Claris Works, a Wordperfect product and a Corel product, and probably a solid half dozen other suites that tried to be everyghing for all knowledge workers.

The integration story didn't work that well back then, and that was when any one of those "integrated suites" cost the same up front as any single office tool, so the cost savings was more significant.

I still like the idea, but it seems harder to make it work well now than it was in the 90s.

Re: Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)

#143

Post by klabb3 »

crazygringo wrote: post #120
klabb3 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think this hyper-granular realtime collaboration like in Google docs is slightly overrated. I think it’s ok to have more a git-like workflow where feedback and changes happen over cycles. As a programmer, I don’t give a shit about your working directory. I do care, however, about your commits :) All I’m saying is this CRDT craze isn’t always necessary or even appropriate for many products. It adds a lot of…

> I actually think this hyper-granular realtime collaboration like in Google docs is slightly overrated. I have to disagree. It's absolutely necessary for a lot of workflows, especially when people are collaborating on a doc in real time during a meeting (super super common), or when you've got 10 reviewers of a doc all leaving their feedback in comments, and comments responding to comments, over the course of the sa…

Heh I’m glad that there’s disagreement. I think I was even surprised myself coming to this conclusion.

> It's absolutely necessary for a lot of workflows, especially when people are collaborating on a doc in real time during a meeting

Well yeah you included the solution in the problem description. I’m not convinced of either the shared control, the talking-typing multitasking or even that the artifact should be a document. Assuming the meeting shouldn’t have been an email in the first place.

> when you've got 10 reviewers of a doc all leaving their feedback in comments over the course of the same hour

This one is easier for me to argue concretely. Shared control with 10 people is awful imo. Suggestions with click to accept can make it better (but then you have a notification problem). But what I really dislike is this perpetual state of work in progress. I think a cyclic workflow is better, with drafts and publish and much less back and forth.

In summary, I’d say that the promise of async work (which is good) ended up being sync instead - for the purposes of the human brain. I don’t want to context switch because Bryan fixed a spelling mistake, or see Janice typing out another bullet point right under mine.

Re: Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)

#146

Post by gwbas1c »

I built something similar many years back. Mine was web based: https://github.com/GWBasic/ObjectCloud

What I would tell my younger self is to spend more time reading through YC's resources about how to start a business. In my case, I built something that I thought there was a need for; but I should have spent a lot more time iterating off of tangible customer needs.

IE, I should have found a handful of customers who needed tight integration among these use cases and let their needs drive the implementation.

Why? There are already plenty of applications that do the same functions. (MS Office, Google Drive, ect, ect.) These applications are mature, and well-understood by the whole market.

I would suggest finding a few customers who are hampered by poor interoperability among 3+ applications / use cases, and focus on their use cases. It'll take you 15+ years to be as mature as products like MS Office, Google Drive, ect; but if you solve a niche's tangible, need, they won't care, because they can't operate their business without you.

Re: Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)

#148

Post by JakeAl »

d3w4s9 wrote: post #121

This is not the first product of the kind and won't be the last one. And they look great in theory but get complicated and very confusing and ultimately never find their place. People don't need an integrated tool that does everything. People need a few very good tools that work well with each other. Confluence/Jira is such an example, and to some extent Google's suite and Microsoft's, plus a few more. Unless you can…

This. Salesforce, is a great example of this. I can't tell you the number of companies that exist just building a simple application that does the one thing customers bought these bloated app suites to do that they liked and became burdened with the developers ecosystem or constant enhancements they make just to justify their dev teams existence. Adobe and Microsoft are also notorious for this, as well as just about every cloud company.

Re: Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)

#150

Post by yieldcrv »

and then 1 api changes and you go to update that, but find out that dependency you ignored the deprecation warning for no longer exists, and then you have to refactor your whole codebase, and then another api changes, and then another service discontinues api access entirely but it happened to be your most sought after integration so then you try making a headless scraper but their UI keeps changing but then…
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