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Comment by qppo | Hacker News Reader

This product announcement taught me that airtable exists and got me interested in it.

I don't know why all the comments here are so snide. I wish my company's product was validated by having TC announce the largest player in our domain was creating a direct competitor to our product. Because I know they can't beat us on price or performance, and creating an inferior product that does the same thing (with a product announcement on TC giving our f'ing name alongside it!) would make me a wealthier man. Money can't buy this kind of ad.

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Microsoft (and, similarly, Amazon) will beat them on price, this much is certain. Microsoft will beat nearly anything on price. They'll also win on integration points, and they'll win on it already being part of the package.

But, they rarely win on performance or features. Those are the verticals you need to hope are critical. In many product domains, actually, these doesn't matter. Microsoft wouldn't be in the dominant position they're in if performance mattered.

I'll say right now: some of the integration points they've shown here, where you can create line-of-business apps that embed directly into Teams, that is going to play so freakin well in sales conversations. Airtable has nothing like that. We don't run any Microsoft services at all at our company, and I want that specific thing; I'd rather it be Airtable inside of Slack, but there are way, way more companies out there who would rather it be Lists in Teams than anything to do with Airtable and Slack.

Airtable is $20/seat/mo on the pro tier (unlocks all the features) for a great UX but comes with harsh restrictions on table size and no webhooks for change data. I'm sure someone can beat them on price. For comparison, the entirety of GSuite is $12/seat/mo for the same tier.

But for the Gsuite you can't really tell if your data is being used, no? Trusting Google is amazingly difficult because of all their whoopsies.

That line of thinking holds up on the personal level—I, as well as many other HN readers I assume, care about it—but at the enterprise level, it won't play at all.

If Gsuite is significantly cheaper, has decent feature parity, and has the name of (one of) the biggest tech companies in the world behind it, it has already won 90% of the sales conversation for enterprise buyers.

I will use this immediately. I loved Airtable, but the pricing was a non starter for our business. We already have office635, and we’re likely to use this all over the place.

It’s bundled with office, so for enterprise customers (where the $$$ is), Lists is free whereas AirTable is not. Even with any pricing adjustments, I find it very unlikely office customers would save going with AirTable. Maybe they have a market in GSuite customers?

Just like with Teams and Slack, the office product just has to be good enough, and it will succeed. Microsoft doesn’t need to make money off it, just protect their office subscriptions. Slack and AirTable need to make money.

Yeah I know someone who is working on rolling out AirTable to many departments in their company over the last few months. This big enterprise corp uses MS Office 365 already (like many big corps). And with so many companies looking to cut corners, with a free product available incorporated into a suite of apps they already pay for why continue to pay for AirTable?

This might make AirTable loose a pretty large customer even if the actual end users in the company prefers AirTable.

How much is AirTable support? How much is Lists/365's?

But most bigcorps already pay for 365 support. And if they were using airtable or considering, Lists starts to look better. This is an addiction to a current MS product.

For many organizations, the fact that it is free is less important than the fact that they already have Office.

If a team in a mid-to-large company wants to use Airtable, they will have to spend a lot of time championing the process--audits, vetting, bidding, legal, data management, and on and on and on.

If they subscribe to Office365, they've already gone through this process. It will either be enabled by default, or be subject to a much less stringent review before IT flips the switch.

Put another way: money (at least the sums involved for most SaaS) is the least important objection a customer might have to adoption.

Side note: this is also part of the reason why Excel is so popular, even though many executives are aware of its short-commings and might wish for something more integrated. Even if they have the budget, it is excruciating trying to onboard a SaaS offering.

Absolutely agree with everything here. But I'm curious what you're considering as an Excel replacement? For anything more sophisticated than Google Sheet's can handle I can't think of a single alternative off-hand.

Apologies, that part of my post was unclear.

I didn’t mean replacements for Excel itself. I meant specific vertical applications that are meant to replace common excel use cases.

I’ve been part of efforts to evaluate tools like Wrike and Aha! as replacements for gnarly excel spreadsheets. A single meeting of the stakeholders (managers of affected teams, VPs, high level engineers) to consider some aspect of the purchase decision cost more in salary and opportunity cost than a year of the SaaS subscription. Actual adoption, implementation, and training turned the cost of the product into a rounding error.

Also important in my field (education) is compliance with records management laws, which means that we do as much as possible with just MS tools in order to avoid needing to export and manage data from so many different sources. We are currently moving projects from Trello to MS Teams + Planner for this reason even though the workflow will likely be worse.

Is teams records management compliant? I know it isn't in my country

It depends on what you do with it, but in my estimation, not really (and it's actually easier to export data from Trello assuming you pay for Business Class). But our IT and records people seem to believe that having everything under the same vendor umbrella is an improvement over having data scattered between services, even if some of the components don't actually offer full compliance.

From a bureaucratic perspective, what auditing feedback looks better:

A: "You're not compliant, what the hell were you thinking using this 'Trello' thingie ?!?"

B: "You're not compliant but it's fine, everyone uses Microsoft like you do so it's probably not possible to be fully OK, we are all in the same boat..."

Feedback B can easily go up the chain with no repercussions. Feedback A cannot. It's a sad world.

Many companies are Microsoft shops and will use Lists even if it's inferior. I imagine the Airtable people are not at all happy about MS entering the market even though they will no doubt spin it in the way you mention.

The one thing big players (with other revenue sources) can always do is beat you on price... usually "free" or packaged with their other products.

Airtable looks amazing! You can even add Gantt blocks. This annoucement has probably got Airtable a new paying customer. I have so many uses for this!

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