Tables: Tracking work for teams
blog.google
blog.google
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 like this -- but I hope they can align their internal politics and business goals here.
(Also, separate nitpick, but they're launching this as "beta", but with a paid plan. Since when is beta software charged for? What does "beta" even mean anymore then?)
I use Keep to share lists with my spouse but even that I don't put anything important into because it could go away as quickly as it showed up.
Not to mention that Keep is deeply integrated with Gmail, Cal, Docs, etc.
No matter how lightweight of a tool it may seem, Keep isn't going away. G Suite is very conservative and careful with changes they make around their core services.
https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/
You'll be fairly overwhelmed in reading it, I imagine.
I'm not sure how many years a startup needs to be around though before it's likelyhood of survival surpasses that of a new google product.
Google? It has to be a massive world spanning success or its a guaranteed goner.
I'm going to respectfully disagree.
Whether a product is being funded by Google or a VC, I'd argue they have a similar desire to make money, or else cut funding.
If a product looks like a failure, the startup isn't going to keep it going or try harder -- the VC's will want to cut their losses.
I honestly don't think there's much of a difference at all. It's the same types of executive tech people making the decisions at the end of the day no matter if it's at a VC or a Megacorp.
Also Reader and FeedBurner felt much like core services during their heyday.
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 made off with probably tens of millions or more to launch a failed product.
Almost anything MSFT releases in response to Google or competitors is inferior but MSFT's products are preferable due to implied longevity. MSFT has inoculated themselves against this parasitic political economy while Google and its users are held hostage by it.
Since forever. I will concede that the cool kids call it "early access" these days, however.
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 and businesses make work a little easier, especially with covid forcing many to digitize and work remotely. If we're able to create a lot of value, that'll make for a strong case to graduate Tables into a larger Google product area, and we're only going to be able to do that with feedback from folks like yourself who can apply a healthy dose of objectivity. :)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this, and we hope you'll give Tables a little time (even Keep took several years before finally joining G Suite)! I'll also take that feedback on the "beta" label back to the team.
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... ?
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!
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 right now.
However, my $0.02 would be that, right now, if I were one of those, I'd look at the landing page and assume that I'd quickly run into a limit and be tricked into paying $10/user/mo., so I'd avoid even trying it out. The 1,000-row limit seems like something I might easily run into, for example if I were simply importing all the alums from the organization's 30-year history.
I wonder if you couldn't come up with a better separation between free and paid that didn't depend on storage, but solely on features? For example, imagine if Sheets were free but charged if you wanted to use pivot tables and database connectors -- something like that. (Also, total storage is hard to estimate in advance, perhaps better to have a limit on attachments per-row? E.g. 64 KB, and it will automatically convert images to JPEG with lower quality/resolution as necessary? Otherwise everything is stored as a link to someone's Drive file?)
I just think if you communicated this as "100% free" but then with a "paid business integration add-on" or something, people would be a lot more willing to try it out. Again, best of luck!
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! :)
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.
Why do I care it is from Area 120? Why even share that branding - it just adds to the confusion. Is this an internal startup? Will it disappear? Stick around?
I already pay for Gsuite, now I should pay for this? Does it work in my gsuite org? Why would I not just go with Airtable at that pricing. How long will it stick around? Why is the feature list so much smaller compared to Airtable? What is their product road map? Why as a business user should I invest in this?
Come on Google, play for keeps, don't just dabble.
That, and given Google's habit of cancelling novel projects, I just wouldn't trust this over a third party service.
https://tables.area120.google.com/u/0/about#/
I am trying to read the screenshots! Quit advancing the slide show to the next screenshot after 5 seconds. I have clicked on "Project & task management" so that I can read that screenshot. That was your (missed) cue to pause the cycling of the slides.
I get that you want to tease the reader by offering several different interesting images that they'll see without scrolling, but maybe after you've captured their interest, it would be nice if they could move to the next step and actually look at the images.
If you have content that you can afford to hide, you can't afford to put it in a premium place and compete with critical content.
It took something like AirTable to wake the sleeping giants, that people wanted a low-code tabular data editor and storage engine, that wasn't really a spreadsheet. You know.. like FileMaker or MS Access.
I guess this goes to show something - I have thought for many, many, many years of building such an application in the cloud (having built "application generator" type applications in the past) - but, it may not have mattered if I had - because the big players might just come in and clone/copy it. It will be interesting to see how companies like AirTable can compete (and really hope they can).
I think we are crawling towards a future of low/no-code - or the dream of the world of 4GL [2] (or perhaps even beyond that) is coming closer and closer. Regarding 4GL, "those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it". Not saying it's a bad thing to be revisiting this, but it has been low-hanging fruit for so long now, you wonder why it took so long for the big companies to engage with it seriously.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-list...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_...
My employer gives me Lists as part of Office 365. It's one of those things that sounds good as long as you're reading about it and not using it. It's just not a competitor to AirTable. Not that I use AT either, because I'm not going to pay that much for what I'd use it, but Lists is pretty bad. The look and feel makes me think Lists is a Perl CGI app from 2001.
I have it too at my workplace, and other than a coat of paint on Sharepoint Lists, I concur, it is not amazing.
I guess I brought it up because it shows Microsoft being driven to do something, but much like Google, falling short of the target. Still, before AirTable and similar things, the giants were generally ignoring this area.
Friendly reminder that low/no-code is just newspeak for "COTS"
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 vendor.
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
I would consider Excel a no-code/low-code (pretty complex macros in there + vba) platform.
It is good product that can grow if it garners sufficient interest. I hope it does.
Next time a VC asks you "what are you going to do if Google builds X too?" send them a link to this discussion!
“Wait.”
Also, "send them flowers every product birthday to thank them for validating the product and growing my future customer base."
Do you think they want to create some distance between them and the rest of Google because ofd Google's reputation of shutting down products? Or maybe they want to launch a product outside the usual bureaucracy?
It literally just has no backing by Google's corporate or business goals.
Even before the “internal incubator” that this came out of, Google hasn't been known for doing a single exclusive offering in a space, so this probably wasn't centrally green lot (because otherwise “internal incubator” makes little sense), and it's release wouldn't (even if it was) exclude another Google offering in the same space. The competitive process you imagine just doesn't seem likely to even approximate the truth.
I laughed at that, at first, thinking it were a joke.
No, no that's a quote from https://area120.google.com/
I'd be a little scared of paying for something in the Google incubator, knowing how they cull stuff that isn't popular. But maybe it'll be successful and go into the bundle.
To my knowledge, nothing majorly successful or long-term supported has ever come out of Area 120.
By lived I do mean no changes to end user for the absorption into another team.
Instead try evaluating the success of Area 120 by the number of Google staff members who have had their "incredible journey" itch scratched and then returned to a product or infrastructure team at Google when their Area 120 project is EOL'ed. From a corporate perspective, it's worth spending some money on throw-away projects to retain staff who might otherwise quit to pursue an actual startup.
If Tables is just it’s own thing, not related to search, GSuite, GCP or ads then it’s already dead. At some level it must suck to know that you’ve created a culture where people don’t even care to try out your new fancy gizmo, because they expect you to abandon to quickly it’s simply not worth investing you time in. Or does Google not know that how they’re perceived?
I suspect if it were to ever emerge from the “internal incubator” Area 120 is described as, it would become a GSuite feature.
> Or does Google not know that how they’re perceived?
I think Google knows that people in certain circles talking nothing but that view. They probably also have real stats on how their experiments are picked up and used, and I suspect they aren't at all what the people who think that the perception you refer to do instead public consciousness would predict.
It has to depend a lot on what type of product/service it is, too. For anything consumer facing, I imagine they don't see this effect harming take-up at all. It probably doesn't affect businesses looking to take-up the more established services like GSuite, but I have a really hard time believing that tech-savvy businesses are looking at any new APIs or services within GCP without considering what their lifetime will be.
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.
Interesting to see it being paid though! The free tier seems very limited for a google product: 1000 rows, 100 tables, 50 bot actions... paid version is $10 a month. 1000 rows won't be enough for anything serious - so they must be really betting on people paying. I guess that's also why it's not integrated directly with GSuite?
I really appreciate that feedback for us, and we're really hoping to make it as useful as possible for you and others! :) As prlambert@ mentioned in another comment, we're kinda like a startup and if things go well, the goal is graduate into larger parts of Google.
A point of clarification on the free tier: we're offering 1000 rows per table--an individual tab within a workspace--which we hope offers a lot of flexibility in mixing and matching data in a workspace to track your work together. If there's particular use cases you have that involve over a 1000 rows, we'd love to hear more about it. Thanks for taking a look at the product!
tl;dr is we'd love to and we're working on it! I'm glad to hear you're interested in Tables, we'll try to get it to you as soon as we can.
Congrats, I hope this product comes to life and be the next must-have tool, I think they will be super cheap in the future anyways because lack of unfair advantage, it's a platform that just need to be ready to be integrable with all existing apis and that have the ability to execute lambdas. But has to be secured otherwise not recommended to be used with sensitive info, I would trust in Google since I use Gmail for my personal things.
I wouldn't surprise when Soho comes with something similar.
Thanks for the kind words, and I hope Tables will help people and businesses in positive ways as well! From my perspective, we just want to offer a decent option for users who want to track team work within the Google ecosystem, especially during this time with covid forcing many businesses to digitize and work remotely.
Thanks for sharing those use cases and we'll take that feedback on the limits back to the team.
What I see so far seems decent, but to make this something I'm actually going to rely on and build on, it needs better placement in Google's portfolio.
Google has reach (read search monopoly), so I guess that is an angle.
If Google doesn't think it's worth putting the full G Suite backing behind this, then I wouldn't trust it beyond a fun thing to play with.
Probably because it's hard to fit all the use cases G Suite customers may have (tiny teams, giant enterprise, growing startups, etc).
Yet, I've always wanted that with my small team working off G Suite mostly. Always having to use an external Project management is fine, but having it done from Google itself would be a great touch. A little like Microsoft Teams/Sharepoint.
I hope that Table can bring us a little step closer.
What is the most successful or longest lived Area 120 product?
Are you sure this is what you wanted to link?
I'm not linked to any of them, Notion's just the one I've used (not really any more), but all seem the same basic idea.
(Depending how you use Notion I suppose - you could just write paragraphs of notes and never see it as a database type thing, I didn't use it for notes like that.)
There's definitely some overlap with the two. This Google project is just more akin to AirTable than Notion.
Paraphrasing the video: Like sheets, but with structured data (columns define data types with relationships) and complex actions/triggers via bots.
Per your original comment, given Google's track record with customer performance//services being dead on arrival, I can imagine few here are interested in learning//migrating their workflow just to be locked out or migrating away not long after.
I'd link to the myriad of hn//twitter//medium posts used to get customer support through bad press, but I'm on mobile, I'll leave that as an exercise to the user.
[1] promo-oriented development
So I won't invest my time considering it.
> Tables is not yet available > The Tables beta is currently available in the U.S.
There is someone in every organization asking to minimize potential legal liability. It's a bit sad that the Chicken Littles have won again.
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 times, while still respecting the boundaries that we've been given. I, like most PMs, hate red tape, but I also appreciate it for the dangers it protects us from. :)
All that said, we're definitely hoping we can offer Tables to more people in the world, so stay tuned!
(Regardless of that, congratulations on your launch and good luck!)
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 bunch of potentially new rules to follow, so it's a lot simpler and safer to do it with just one country first, get it right, and then expand after that. In my experience, there's no particular opinion that users from a particular country are "unsafe," but it's more about whether we have enough time and people to make sure we're doing things right by our users.
Hope that gives you a little insight into this and how we think about it!
We're all tired of the obligatory "I wonder how long before Google deprecates this...;)" but I wonder if Google would get better adoption if they explicitly published what would be needed for them not to drop the product... 1M monthly users? 3M? ...xM? or that when a project actually reaches that point.
Google saying “if we get X users we won’t cancel it” both sounds like a hostage note, and doesn’t matter because we fundamentally don’t trust Google. Without that trust, it doesn’t matter why they say, since it won’t be believed.
Feedly picked up 3 million new users in the two weeks following Google shutting down Reader. Based on that alone I would never trust Google not to shut down a product that seems popular and well-used.
Literally the only thing that would change my perception of Google's short-termism would be if they don't shut down any products in the next 10 years.
This is a really helpful comment and I like the nod to transparency. Thank you! Not sure we could get quite so concrete publicly (there are lots of unknowns and wouldn't want to make commitments we can't keep), but aligning goals between the business, team, and users/customers is a great idea and something we can improve on.
I'm a stranger on the internet and even I can feel the burn.
Good luck.
Products come and products go, this is not unique to Google. Killed By Google is cited as some sort of proof, but that goes back to _2003_, and does nothing to talk about whether the product was replaced with something new that users were transitioned to.
Then you have a company like Microsoft that keeps things around in perpetuity, but sometimes to the chagrin of users who want new features added or you get incongruent UX (you can still find plenty of very old apps in Windows 10). And this is fine too, but it's not a meme and so never comes up.
Not sure where the "elite" or "450k/year" is coming from as well in the parent comment. Perhaps give that comment another chance to see what they are actually saying?
Disc: Googler.
OP brought up another point about Google being a 20 year old company so you are ought to see lot of products being shut down over the time. While the reply had nothing to do with that but instead resorted to ad hominem attack.
Unlike me, he has absurd wealth. I’m lucky if I hit $200k after 3 years tenure at Amazon.
While products come and go is true, it's more a matter of scale on why this reputation exists.
I know I personally have been burned by the platform I was using going out from beneath me. That memory comes up each time I am considering between an AWS (where its never happened to me), azure, and google cloud solution.
It's not a meme. It's a very real problem that prevents people from wanting to invest in Google services. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy too when people don't use these services, then they get shuttered for low usage.
Google has a huge amount of work to do to earn the trust they've burned, and responses like this damage the cause further. You've cemented firmly in my mind that staying the hell away from this and anything Google has to offer is the right choice, as they clearly don't take this problem seriously and won't even acknowledge it.
I really think you should reconsider.
It's also a consequence of the business models that Google has explicitly chosen, i.e. your employer has chosen to incur this reputation.
>Then you have a company like Microsoft that keeps things around in perpetuity, but sometimes to the chagrin of users who want new features added or you get incongruent UX (you can still find plenty of very old apps in Windows 10). And this is fine too, but it's not a meme and so never comes up.
I'm not exactly the biggest fan of MS, but our company has saved tens of thousands of dollars in software costs because we could use old software designed for Win XP/7 on Win 10 w/o re-buying the software from the vendor. (Biotech s/w costs can get super crazy, esp with 21CFR validation)
Definitely not a resourcing issue, entirely an organizational culture and philosophy decision to be made.
Also, is Area 120 the new Google Labs? I thought they killed off the whole Labs thing a couple of years ago? (The irony is not lost on me here.)
Once the distinction between products with long-term commitment and experimental products is super clear with a uniform icon/logo then there'll be less disappointment and upset future customers
I'd say they should use the same logo whether it's an area120 project, an experimental chrome extension from YT team, some research experiment, some VR experimental app, etc.
further, we're never going to get sustainable businesses out of google because they don't have the patience relative to their search and advertising behemoths. these kinds of projects are designed to keep the more adventurous developers in the fold with golden handcuffs, to both reduce existential threats to google and as a held front in the developer wars against other tech companies. lastly, constraints spur ingenuity (business and technical), and google engineers are just too comfortable for that.
all that (and more) means that google is simply not in the business of creating new businesses, no matter the rhetoric. unless something drastic changes, there's no reason to invest in any new google development.
Looks like its straight forward product for somebody who makes google spreadsheets.
Ironically, unlike desktop software when you had to convince people to purchase a new copy each year, it seems like the Cloud distribution model allows google to basically put their products in maintenance mode indefinitely since people will still be paying for the subscription each month and switching cost is high.
At Google, they said, you get significant bonuses, promotions, and prestige for launching a brand new product, especially to large fanfare or hype. Conversely, you get little to no bonuses, promotions, or prestige for maintaining that product long-term.
That means that Googlers have huge incentives to create and launch promising projects, and then immediately transfer off that project to some other new project to create and launch that, leaving some other team to maintain it, thanklessly.
This means that, in the absence of top-down direction from the executive level, GSuite will remain effectively stagnant forever, with minimal, if any, improvements. In my experience managing IT for a small startup that used GSuite extensively, this was generally true; the service as a whole was "promising", but had huge gaps in functionality or integrations that would never be addressed (like being able to back up/export a user's data without having to log in as them and request a Takeout file).
Another example is Google Inbox; again, a new-ish project, launched to much fanfare and rave reviews, but once it's launched, who cares? So it was "integrated into" regular Google Mail inbox, except it wasn't because the team doing the integration isn't going to get those huge bonuses for doing all that work so why bother?
I'm not 100% sure that this is true; again, I "read it in a thing that someone said", for all the validity that has, but it would certainly explain why so many of Google's products feel 80-90% finished, and have for a decade or more.
In this respect, I've effectively given up on Google ever improving anything, unless doing so will help stifle the competition's growth. Improve Android to counter iOS? Sure. Improve Google Docs to counter Microsoft Office? Nah, we're mostly dominant there already.
Google's political economy is groups building new products not to build new revenue streams but to claim larger bonuses of the ad-revenue pie. Limited shelf life products and their users are just cannon fodder in that game.
So this is some people's pet project that has no backing from Google. Given Google kills products (whose full time jobs) at any time, I wouldn't be surprised Google kills Tables before I finish this sentence.
The one big difference being that I believe Notion will outlive Tables - especially as Tables is already touted as an incubated project.
But I was surprised to find relatively basic features (like find/replace in page or a shortcut to find in table) missing so hopefully Notion's team will get around to implementing those soon.
The other comments about viability and long term support of Google's experimental products are very valid. But if it can help light up a fire under SmartSheet to improve their interface, that's not a bad outcome.
Looking at some of the other announcements on their blog, there's no way that an actual human either wrote those headlines or came up with the product ideas in the first place:
* Fundo: a virtual experiences platform for creators
* Shoploop: an entertaining new way to shop online
* AdLingo Ads Builder turns an ad into a conversation
* GameSnacks brings quick, casual games to any device
Has anyone been round to their offices recently to see if they're okay?
There isn't a single work tracking/time tracking/task management system on the planet that isn't terrible in some way or form. I still don't get why no one has figured it out.
Because of these reasons I started Baserow (https://baserow.io), which is an open source (https://gitlab.com/bramw/baserow) alternative to Airtable and the listed tools above. It is still in an early phase, but every week new features are implemented.
Some unique points:
- Unlimited rows.
- Open source, released under the MIT license.
- Uses popular frameworks like Django and Nuxt.js
- Uses PostgreSQL as database backend.
- It can be self hosted.
- You can have many rows per table, 100k+.
- Headless and API first.
- Supports plugins.
https://gitlab.com/bramw/baserow/-/tree/develop/web-frontend...
They do use Nuxt, a fullstack framework for Vue.js, which is style-agnostic.
Google is entering a crowded market, with a so-so offering, with zero guarantee that it won't be cancelled in a year (judging by history, it most likely will).
I'm sorry, I used to get really excited about new offerings from Google, and would jump on the bandwagon.
I'm a lot more cautious now. I can't see a reason to use this tool as part of any business I'm involved with. The risk is high, the reward is low, and the features aren't competitive with others in the space.
IMHO, this should have been open sourced as a good-will project, I'd definitely be interested then.
Even an open-core type model would attract me.
It's going to be harder for these types of apps to get traction in less tech-centric markets. This is especially the case if the "it's part of the suite you own" argument starts to come up more frequently.
Just kidding. I do think it's a very fair concern for people to have. Google has that reputation. But honestly, many things on HN are from startups that may go away. And it isn't just Google. I was a huge fan of Apple's Aperture, for example, and they let that die on the vine.
For us, we think there is a real need for this kind of product. And we hope the one we built works well for our users. The team is really invested in the product. We plan to do all we can to make it successful.
I believe the comments covered that as well - this feels like a new flavor matching existing products. With the lack of trust in Google to keep it alive, combined with the fact that it just doesn't look to be innovative... it simply does not sound compelling.
If we got it wrong and there is more to it than "Google's attempt at AirTable", then perhaps the communication on what this product is supposed to be has missed the mark.
You say Airtable. Others have said Monday.com. Others have said Asana and Notion, etc.
The fact that there are a lot of products in this space -- in my opinion -- shows that there is a real need. It also shows that no one has quite got it right. Of course there are similarities between our product and others. "Tables of data" is not a new concept. "No-code" is not new.
This launch is our first step. We expect to grow with our users. And we hope we can delight them.
Like hangout > chat, let's drop the existing feature of read receipt that is even more important in the remote/work world in a product geared toward business.
Let's do an integration of task & files in chat in gmail but not what's suppose to be the primary app the standalone chat.
Let's take 3 release to decide yes there is some usefulness to wireless scanning and we can put it as an advance option.
It's not just dropping produces, it's actually degradation of function as if just to bump up the changelog size.
Since then they've gradually removed useful features, cluttered the UI with crap, and dumbed everything down to the point where it's almost useless. At one point they even removed the map scale, I think you have to enable an option buried in a menu to bring it back.
It's gotten so incredibly slow and clumsy to use that it's not even worth it half the time.
Google Photos is rapidly heading in that direction. They seem to be distancing you more and more from your photos and trying to throw their services in your face.
Google is on its way to become the new ____.
IBM ?
A few years ago it used to have air quality index. Then, it just disappeared one day for unknown reasons. According to this article, it disappeared in 2018 https://9to5google.com/2018/11/11/google-weather-missing-air...
So this bug fix or feature regression is probably sitting in their backlog somewhere. Now the past few weeks, the skies in the Bay Area have turned orange and there's extreme unhealthy air quality for weeks. And not a single Google developer thought, hey we really should prioritize fixing that air quality bug now? Does anyone at Google even use Android? How can the skies be orange and it's so dark during daytime from smoke that headlights are on, but no one noticed the Weather app doesn't have air quality index?
Is it like Google Spreadsheets, Google Forms? Trello? All three with some AI sprinkled on top?
Tables PM here; your comment caught my eye as it had an interesting point about the Sheets API access changes that are coming. We do offer an API and while Tables isn't intended as a replacement for Sheets in any way, we're hoping it might be useful for folks who do need a lightweight database for their work. :)
I wanted to be fair and call out that Airtable also has a free tier (and API), and they offer a lot of great features and functionality as well that can be great for startups!
At the end of the day, you should use what fits your needs best. I wanted to create Tables because our team didn't have a great work tracking tool that quite fit our needs, and it felt like we could help other Google apps users and businesses too (especially during this time of remote working with covid). I hope you'll get to make your work life simpler, no matter whichever tool you choose.
It sounds interesting and I was wondering what people thought about it and how it works out in practice.
We've been actively working with many different companies (Betterment, Lyft, Figma, Dropbox) who have used Byteboard to ensure a more practical interview that is more relevant to the job. We have a candidate NPS of 4.1 / 5 which we are really proud of. :)
You can also check our twitter https://twitter.com/BrentA1283/status/1301918622873460737 to hear more from candidates who have tweeted at us about their experience!
Hard technology vs. apps/services?
I have a wider question too; large organisations spend millions building internal tools like this (and for a plethora of other things technical and project related). None of which are market leading and all of which progress steadily to abondonware...
It feels like once a corporation has gotten to that point its just too large and lost its core focus. I've seen (recently) pivots from poor UI's and interfaces to integrating one great SAAS tool with another great SAAS tool - because both the SAAS figured out all that stuff ages ago for you... at 10% of the cost.
Simplified: If you spend $1 million each on ten projects, each of which have a 90% chance to fail and 10% chance to bring in $100m in profits, then it is absolutely worth it
And more to the point; are these projects "failing" because savvy companies are working out that the play is short term seeking either high growth or death...
EDIT: 205 https://killedbygoogle.com/
Unfortunately, such a program would likely be sunset after a year.
The real issue is this: Why am I paying 10 dollars/user/month for this when G suite Business is 12? I could see using this for the organization, but not at that cost.
If nobody wants to pay, you at least know that.
Even if you had the source code to the app (which Google isn't about to give out at any price), what you'll find is that it's an app architected to link against libraries nobody has ever seen and run atop a distributed computing fabric that's loosely related to Kubernetes but, really, nobody's ever seen, storing data to a backing store nobody's ever seen, and identifying users via an authentication model that nobody's ever seen.
Dangling references all over the place, leading to special sauce Google is even less likely to publish, because it's deeply tied into a physical hardware architecture that Google can't publish, because even if they did nobody's going to build it.
Some of Google's user-facing stuff runs on the architectures they make public, like GCP. But a lot of it runs on Google's proprietary fabric of service management and distributed storage, which is an alien planet relative to the world outside their walls. Publishing an app out of that part of the ecosystem would be like Google handing a company a koala with no eucalyptus trees. It'd be dead in days.
I don't think this is true. Plenty of "normal", non-HN people bring this up too (I mean, not my mom, but like regular somewhat tech-savvy people). You can point to GCP all you want, but people are just going to keep pointing to https://killedbygoogle.com/.
What you're doing is claiming people hold an easily attackable position that they don't hold, and attacking that position. It's called strawmanning.
I'm going to look at this idea, see what it might be able to do, and look at whether there's another alternative that would be likelier to survive.
“Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud”
And they point blank said that Google is not investing into GCP and implied that it's on a death bed.
LOL
1. Some of the things they launch they probably shouldn't be launching because they have next to no chance of ever being a meaningful business for Google. (eg. Google Helpouts)
2. Some of the things they launch are attempts to get into a particular area and Google's interest in that area lasts longer than their interest in whatever they initially launched. Chat is probably the best example of this; Google Talk, Hangouts, heck, I don't even know what it's called now! In such cases Google should be more disciplined about supporting whatever it is they've launched. Re-brand & iterate as much as they want, but never leave customers hanging.
I think if Google followed these two rules they would be sunsetting a lot less stuff. They might still need to retire the odd product/service, but at least they wouldn't be doing it so much that customers doubt every single launch.
Their current approach hasn't been working well for their customers, but it's actually going to begin affecting their customers less and affect Google more. Who in their right mind would put any medium/long term stock into Tables, for example? Customers no longer affected. Now Google can't launch a service that the market will take seriously.
Not sure when that was released, though!
We are talking about document sizes that Word for Windows 95 could handle.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/connecting-bi...
I'm inclined to agree with you on Docs though, there is a bunch of stuff that Notion does (really badly IMO) that Drive/Docs just can't do, and so people use Notion instead.
For example (in case any Google PMs are reading), folding bullets, easily embedding tables, embedding sub-docs, faster navigation/caching of folders in the web browser, and perhaps most important, a sensible way to build a wiki-type knowledge base, with "front pages" on each directory (like how Github handles README.md).
In terms of HN’s overt purpose, it is.
> it's a valid market signal
Every expression of anyone's reaction to a brand is “valid market signal” on the level that that is true of this, but that doesn't stop most of that from being noise in an HN comment thread.
> So I'll side with automatically appending one such comment in every Google thread until their behavior visibly changes.
Such an automated comment would still be noise, but would have less of excuse of being a valid market signal than comments posted organically, even if that was an excuse (which it's not.)
In the past, many companies have had "not great" reputations for supporting products, but surely Google have taken it to level not seen before. The fact that pretty much all of their products live in the cloud rather than being software that can continue to be used beyond the support period (ala Win98) has probably contributed a lot to that. I think the way that potential customers react to that reputation is very interesting.
We're at the point now where Google have clearly acquired this reputation and it's very likely to affect the adoption of anything they try to launch. The next phase will be Google recognising that and trying to correct it somehow. I'm keen to follow along and see how that goes.
Sure, that's a reason discussion of the phenomenon is appropriate for HN, just as discussion of AI-driven automated spamming of message boards as a marketing technique might be. (Though, even then, not an appropriate thing to derail every thread in which a Google product is the subject into.)
OTOH, that doesn't make the phenomenon itself appropriate for HN, in any place.
No, it's not.
> There is a real risk that they will abandon anything they launch.
There is a real risk that any company will do that, either by internal choice, or by change of plan due to acquisition, or by business failures. It really isn't necessary or helpful for people who have no interest in Google products because of their view of the brand (whether for this reason or any other) to pollute every discussion thread about a Google product with this.
I think it's highly predictable. Where in their org does it fit, how much have they invested in it, how big is the opportunity, etc.
For the record, https://www.paymoapp.com (work management) was the first to use Work better, together. Really annoying that they don't do at least a bit of research.
It looks you started using to this slogan in 2019. Prior to that, it was "Work Happy": https://web.archive.org/web/20181116030147/https://www.paymo...
But there was at least one other business using "Work better together" in 2017: https://web.archive.org/web/20170515171057/https://projectin...
Sept 22, 2021.
Google Announces that Google Tables will be sunset and all users will have to migrate away by Sept 23, 2021.
"Google Tables was a great experiment but we're migrating to Google Tracker - a better version of Google Tables designed for power users." said Dep Re. Kated, VP of Engineering at Google.
Google Tables has no migration tool or system for users to export their data angering some users.
There's no support available for people wanting to get their data off the platform and many users are upset.
"There's no support number? I can't even pay if I wanted to!" said Alice Bob Carol, a huge fan of Google Tables that is upset it's going away.
When I tried to login it told me that "suspicious behavior was detected" and locked my account. Now I can't get access to my data and there's no one I can even contact!
(this was a parody but I'm calling it now - Google products are already dead when they're launched)
And it's somewhat in the same space as Tables.
Weird. Last I checked, even when deprecations happen, the data is accessible via Takeout.
Even JSON is too complex for non-programmers.
Coupled with in-file tokens, it makes for an easy format to export into anything.
That's why I am using it as the base format for my forum application.
At any time, the entire forum content can be exported into plaintext, which is readable by most users on most platforms (except iOS)
And also can be re-imported into just about anything with a quick Perl script.
There's a reason plaintext is rarely used as the preferred method of semantic data exchange. What's our preferred method of representing images with plaintext? Audio files? Rich text, such as Google Docs? Spreadsheets (complete with formulae and attached macros)? Databases that contain bin-blob fields?
> And also can be re-imported into just about anything with a quick Perl script.
In your specific use case, I expect that works well. In the general case, my experience has been that plaintext can be imported into just about anything incorrectly with a quick Perl script. And when the data is MBs / GBs, the odds that such an error goes unnoticed until the data is needed and cannot be reconstituted are high.
For instance, consider email or newsgroups formats, with key-value attribute headers, with the difference of putting them at the bottom of the file.
With each "item" being a text file, you could easily fit the average person's Facebook profile into a zip file of (folder-arranged) text files with the content at the top and the extra attributes (e.g. timestamp, reply-to, etc.) below.
Even for someone very active, this would only be several hundred text files per day, so several hundred thousand per year, and several million for an entire profile. With that many, you'd probably have to split them up, but for the average person with maybe several hundred thousand, that's a manageable number of textfiles to put into a zip file.
These textfiles could be almost trivially imported into a relational database with a simple script.
At the same time, the user can also browse the contents of the zip file if the folder structure is arranged thoughtfully.
Of course, I am talking about text only, not images or videos. For these, you would have to either use metadata or have a matching text-file to go with the file.
These days exports are at least usable, so that you can hire a programmer to make something useful out of it, if you need.
I've already helped people make tools to create automated summaries for counting billable hours for language lessons taught over skype or messanger, which was only possible thanks to these exports finally being in some processable format, with enough metadata included.
It's not either or though. Services can export in both nice usable formats, and html garbage that is nice to look at but useless for anything else.
Given this is explicitly being launched under "Area 120", "Google's workshop for experimental products", I think it's fair to let them ship things, try things out, see what works, and close what doesn't.
Certainly not going to shift my team or multiple teams onto it if I can't trust it's going to be there tomorrow.
Users: Hey Google, please commit to supporting your new shiny product for the long-haul!
Stalemate. Google did this to themselves.
That's winning an early customer, that's proving product/market fit, that's progress. That's why Google would do this.
The marketing material pitches it as a much bigger deal, but then would anyone sign up if it didn't? There's a minimum quality bar that many people expect before signing up, and from a known entity like Google that's likely a much higher bar.
I almost wonder if they're making problems for themselves by naming it under the Google brand? Being completely separate they'd be able to fail faster, ship something lower quality that still proved product/market fit, etc. Area 120 seems to be their attempt to create this space, but I'm undecided on how well I think it will work.
Unless you're a Google competitor there's likely no reason to exclude Google products.
(I'm not any kind of Google fanboy. Just bored of predictable takes like this.)
Maybe that's a concept for a startup. Betting on when Google dismisses new products.
edit: mandatory link to https://killedbygoogle.com/
I don’t mind trying experimental personal tools, but I really don’t want to get a whole team of people reliant on this thing, just to see it get cancelled like the hundreds of other projects Google has killed over the years.
A paid support option would be nice too - I think I saw something about a paid “support for ANY Google product” option earlier this year but I can’t find it just now.
Then you soak up all the customers who still wanted it.
Works damn near every time.
Yeah I’m going to pass. This will just be deprecated in the near future.
Also, like all google's mobile apps, the iOS version is just straight up better: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-chrome/id535886823
Looks like there's a new flag chrome://flags#enable-conditional-tabstrip [0]. Here we go again.
Area 120 is bizarre to me. It's an experimental startup incubator whatever, which is cool, but it runs under the Google brand so the effect is that it's a reputation-incinerator that highlights and deepens one of Google's worst attributes -- product support non-longevity.
And they are trying to take money for it, with no promise of long-term support?