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Comment by d3w4s9 | Hacker News Reader

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 do it better than them in each category -- doc, spreadsheet and project management etc -- people won't choose your product over those. (RIP Google Wave.)

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I tried the "Doc", "Sheet" and "Slide" feature and each of them are incomplete and lacks most of the popular features. It would be better if the author uses existing solutions instead of implement them from ground up.

editor.js [0] for documents and Grist [1] for spreadsheet are some good examples.

[0]: https://editorjs.io/ [1]: https://www.getgrist.com/

Do you mind sharing what you tried to do? So I can improve the feature discovery or add the features later on.

Editor.js looks interesting. Nino Doc is based on ProseMirror. Never heard of grist before but I think react-datasheet-grid is a pretty good. I've been itching for a frontend rewrite of Nino Sheet.

You’re describing Unix philosophy basically, right? While I like it I think it doesn’t scale past certain point - think about cases like companies finding they have trouble maintaining a system made up of tons of bash scripts (most config driven systems e.g. CIs fall into this).

Same applies to SaaS IMO.

> ultimately never find their place

Here’s a few counter examples: - Clickup - Notion - Datadog - Amplitude

I feel like they have found their place quite well.

In fact there’s an industry trend in 2020s of SaaS consolidation over to “vertical SaaS” that just does everything in one tool.

Happy to be proven wrong and hear some counter examples btw, this is just my theory based on what I’ve observed in b2b saas world over past 10ish years

Not going to counter you. In related examples, I will pick ClickUp from your list. It is the closest to this one in terms of trying to combine a database, (multi)composition, and communication (Notion is more specialized than that.)

I would say that in this arena, the 2010s started with Quip and ended with ClickUp. Quip was sold at $750 million, but Salesforce never let it bloom. ClickUp is now worth 4 billion dollars.

Just one critical thought: Consolidation must transcend mere visual modularity and deliver deeper usefull integration to compensate for the absence of features of dedicated tools.

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.

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.

Indeed. The issue I've repeatedly seen, is that ten different people, have ten different combinations and alternatives of what are "very good tools".

And even then, these people aren't fixed in time. Maybe today I need a killer personal time tracker, tomorrow I might need an advanced scrum board and in two years I need a way to aggregate time tracking of a whole team. And that's just one tiny tool.

Personally, I use neovim and markdown for everything.

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