Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also need a runway, which they don't.
maybe all they need is a layover?
The real trouble was that most of the flight crew ordered the fish.
Airtable acquires Airplane
121–130 of 168 posts
Re: Airtable acquires Airplane
#122As another competitor to Airplane (not a direct one, however), I also find it really sad that they are shutting down. They were able to build a good product for their market segment, but it seems like they failed operationally and burned through all their cash. And probably because AI is attracting all the available VC money now, it was hard for them to raise more.
Interestingly, this is already the second product from the "Internal Tools" segment to shut down. The first one was internal.io, which announced its closure in December. However, in their case, I believe it was more of a product issue, though they still had several big names among their clients.
I wonder if this is a sign of consolidation in the internal tools/low-code segment and how many of the players in this market will be able to survive the current economic situation. I suspect that many VC-funded products, especially the smaller ones, are at high risk. And I can only be grateful that UI Bakery is bootstrapped, profitable, and at one point we decided not to take any investments and grow slowly but remain independent.
Re: Airtable acquires Airplane
#123(Founder of windmill.dev, the closest alternative to Airplane and we are OSS) Congrats on the acquisition Airplane team. You were a strong inspiration for us, a precursor and set a high-quality bar for pro-code developer platforms. I have nothing but respect for the Airplane team and we probably wouldn't exist in our current form without your competition. We are ready to migrate all Airplane customers and the migrati…
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This seems both appropriate and helpful to me. If I was an airplane customer I'd love to know what my alternatives are now that it's being shut down.
Re: Airtable acquires Airplane
#124pretty sure they only acquired it because of the word "air" in the name /s
Rumour has it Brian Chesky is in talks with Airtable...
Re: Airtable acquires Airplane
#125pretty sure they only acquired it because of the word "air" in the name /s
Remember Janssen, the Belgian Johnson & Johnson subsidiary which developed the single-shot covid vaccine? I always vaguely assumed that it was a subsidiary that they _started_, explaining the name, but it was actually a completely separate company called Janssen that they bought in the 60s. Nominative determinism, but for companies!
Re: Airtable acquires Airplane
#126we do a lot of cron-related seo and for years the airplane guys have been buying ads on tons of cron-related terms including our own brand, with the pitch “ditch your cron jobs for airplane”. Sigh. It truly sucks for the devs that took them up on that pitch. Meanwhile cron is still working fine. In their defense, dev tools businesses are hard. We’ve navigated it by staying lean with very efficient go to market, but t…
> dev tools businesses are hard I understand why dev tools business are hard, i'm just curious as to what makes them hard? I know one of the things that make it a difficult sell is that devs don't buy much but what else?
Another big factor is that devs know that startups can (and, as in this case, will) go out of business, so they’d rather go with an FOSS offering that can’t just disappear with two months to transition off of the platform.
Re: Airtable acquires Airplane
#127Re: Airtable acquires Airplane
#128I don't get it. According to the blogpost, 450,000 organizations use Airplane, and over 50% of Fortune 500s are paying customers? Okay, that suggests a viable business. And then they're shutting down? Normally you'd expect to see some layoffs and a paring down to profitability: it is SAAS, after all, so you'd expect high gross margins that could be operated by a skeleton crew if necessary. I'm wondering what happened…
> Over 450,000 organizations use Airtable and over 50% of the Fortune 500 are paying customers That’s Airtable (the acquirer) not Airplane. I’d be astonished if Airplane had anywhere near that much traction.
Oops :facepalm:. If only I could read...
Re: Airtable acquires Airplane
#129They had a great website and UX. Would love to know why this change.
A few years ago we were very worried about the seemingly large number of dev tooling VC funded startups. It's hard to beat someone that doesn't need to turn a profit. But just focussing on our niche and improving our products each day has worked.
We make a low-code offering that allows creating interactive applications. We are much less of a generic tool, more specialized towards "real-time" and often finance based apps. If that sounds useful to you please checkout PulseUI: https://www.timestored.com/pulse/
My business partner and I bootstrapped the company 12+ years ago and have been profitably supplying data tooling for years. We've often signed escrow with larger companies to avoid this kind of bus-factor problem and are now going open source: https://github.com/timestored/pulseui Given our first product was started over a decade ago it's a journey to get there.
Re: Airtable acquires Airplane
#130> As part of this transition, we will unfortunately be sunsetting the Airplane platform on March 1. We’ve closed new signups, and existing users will be receiving an email with further details. > To all our users and customers: we are sincerely grateful for your interest, support, and feedback over the years. It’s been a pleasure and an honor to learn about, collaborate with, and assist your organizations. i was/am a…
Yes, this is sad to hear. This blog post from Airplane https://www.airplane.dev/blog/no-code-has-no-future-in-a-wor... had resonated with me. I think platforms which help teams securely deploy and manage low-code solutions generated with AI assistance are going to become popular. The challenge for Airplane might have been that SaaS (as against open source) in the developer tools space is difficult to sell.
Thanks for that link. I think he's correct, no-code is dead. What he hasn't made clear in the article and I think is implied is that low-code is the future.
"They have to re-create their own (usually subpar) versions of IDEs, version control, code review, integration testing, and more." - Our solution to this will be to allow users to use actual git as the input method. i.e. Coder sets code in git, gets reviewed in github or similar, merged and released. Now the edits will need done in the UI initially but where possible code will be exposed sensibly. e.g. SQL queries written will be visible. Many other tools are beginning to do similar.
An interesting conundrum to this. If AI can be used with no-code OR with low-code does it matter.