[HN Gopher] Tables: Tracking work for teams
___________________________________________________________________
Tables: Tracking work for teams
Author : Navarr
Score : 262 points
Date : 2020-09-22 14:16 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
| [deleted]
| unixhero wrote:
| The following is a sarcastic joke. Probably prescient.
|
| ---------------
|
| NOTICE
|
| Tables will be sunset starting 1 november 2022. From that date
| and onwards Tables is read i ly and you may export your data.
| January 31 2023 Tables will be shutdown and your data abd
| instances will be unavailable from here on.
| anticensor wrote:
| Is it a joke or a real insider info?
| adrianmonk wrote:
| Dear crazy person who designed this web page:
|
| 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.
| Lightbody wrote:
| They should have consulted this :)
|
| http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/
| thecrumb wrote:
| Google 'beta'. Release product you will fall in love with it.
| Abandon in x years later. No thanks.
| polskibus wrote:
| Someone could use Auto ML to build a model that predicts from
| launch description how soon a Google project will be abandoned?
| sixdimensional wrote:
| Just to be fair, Microsoft also recently re-launched a tuned-up
| version of Sharepoint Lists, now just called "Lists" [1] which is
| in the same space.
|
| 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_...
| bachmeier wrote:
| > It took something like AirTable to wake the sleeping giants
|
| 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.
| sixdimensional wrote:
| LOL. Well, Microsoft's "Lists" are Sharepoint Lists
| underneath. Sharepoint Lists are pretty old, so your comment
| about Perl/CGI.. well, you're not far off!
|
| 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.
| nojito wrote:
| Seems like a great start, but it kind pales in comparison to
| Microsoft Lists + Power Automate.
| topbanana wrote:
| I remember the day when I'd be excited about any new Google beta.
| Frankly, I'm not even going to look at this one
| Kapura wrote:
| This is what I feel now. A google product launch is just
| another opportunity for them to hurt me. I have friends who
| still pour one out for Inbox.
| bram2w wrote:
| I see a lot of comments about people who are worried that Google
| might shutdown the service entirely and I agree with your
| concerns. The last months we have seen a lot of giants building
| their own database spreadsheet like hybrid, Google Tables,
| Microsoft Lists and Amazon Honeycode. Tools like these contain
| your most important data and you want to have freedom, security
| and independence as they can be an important part of your
| business.
|
| 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.
| datasert wrote:
| Your website design looks very nice. What css/ui framework did
| you make use of it?
| bram2w wrote:
| Thanks! It does not use a css/ui framework. It is something I
| designed and build from scratch.
| lioeters wrote:
| I believe they didn't use any CSS framework, it's handrolled
| Sass styles (other than Normalize and Font Awesome).
|
| https://gitlab.com/bramw/baserow/-/tree/develop/web-
| frontend...
|
| They do use Nuxt, a fullstack framework for Vue.js, which is
| style-agnostic.
|
| https://nuxtjs.org/
| AntonyGarand wrote:
| Seatable[0] is another alternative which is mostly open source,
| following a licensing similar to MongoDB for their server if I
| recall correctly. They're now on version 1.3, not sure if
| they're fully stable yet but it's a viable self-hosted
| alternative.
|
| [0] https://seatable.io/
| heavyset_go wrote:
| This is pretty cool, thanks!
| airstrike wrote:
| Amazing work. This may be a very obvious question, but just to
| be clear, does the github repo offer the same as the hosted
| SaaS version? Meaning can I host this internally and play
| around with it as a proof-of-concept at work?
| bram2w wrote:
| Yes you can! The open source version offers the same
| functionality as the SaaS version. If you have Docker
| installed on your computer you can follow the demo
| environment tutorial at https://baserow.io/docs/guides/demo-
| environment to test out a copy locally.
| asou wrote:
| Anyway to generate types ( like I define Box, I get a Box
| object ) for something like a node SDK. Strapi does this,
| agentdrtran wrote:
| what if Airtable, but dead in a year?
| Tokkemon wrote:
| Why can't I just use Jira?
| alasdair_ wrote:
| My gut reaction: it looks great! Also, there is no way I'd use it
| unless Google committed to not killing it off for at least five
| years.
|
| 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.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| Is it even remotely possible that Google would sell
| discontinued products to other entities, e.g. raise money to
| buy Wave as a separate company or something like that?
| jordanthoms wrote:
| Google products are generally dependent on a whole lot of
| services which only exist within Google, so it'd probably
| have to be rebuilt after a sale.
| dmoy wrote:
| I would guess the monorepo makes this very difficult to do
| ithkuil wrote:
| Not as long as products are built on top of proprietary
| internal SDKs such as google3, borg etc. Google started to
| open source some of the internal projects (e.g. bazel),
| which, among other things, would make it easier to just
| donate / spin off a project they are no longer interested
| supporting.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| I worked at a Google spinoff a few years ago. It took a lot
| of work to move everything from internal Google
| infrastructure to external (Google Cloud) and it probably
| took a full year after the official date of us leaving
| Google to have everything fully migrated - there were lots
| of small things like seldom used config files or occasional
| scripts that still relied on Google's internal stuff.
| ponker wrote:
| Also a failed product from Google will be worth no more
| than $1 billion which is hard to get the Google C-suite
| excited about.
| ianmobbs wrote:
| I believe it's "Google One" -
| https://one.google.com/about/support
| rodiger wrote:
| https://cloud.google.com/support It's not ANY, but it's all
| GSuite/GCP products.
| xwdv wrote:
| One easy way to make a successful startup is to copy something
| Google is doing completely, and then wait for them to kill it
| off because it doesn't make enough profit for them to be
| worthwhile.
|
| Then you soak up all the customers who still wanted it.
|
| Works damn near every time.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| How many successful startups have you made from this plan?
| the-dude wrote:
| Do you have a handful of examples?
| benjaminjackman wrote:
| Maybe RSS readers?
| mikeabraham wrote:
| Is it April 1st?
| kennyadam wrote:
| You know Google has a serious credibility problem when half or
| more of the comments on tech sites covering product launches are
| questioning when Google will decide to randomly pull the plug.
| comeonseriously wrote:
| They don't care. They're revenue is from ads. If they get a
| bump in revenue from gleaning information off of Tables (tm) to
| display relevant ads to you for the year this will be active,
| then maybe it was worth it.
| burtonator wrote:
| It seems like 80% of these projects are pet projects by VPs so
| they can launch a Google project for their career or Google can
| keep them from leaving for Facebook.
| [deleted]
| puranjay wrote:
| Google Docs and Sheets already feels like abandonedware. I
| haven't seen any substantial changes in years.
| delecti wrote:
| I can't imagine what additional features the overwhelming
| majority of people need out of a word processor or
| spreadsheet software.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I recently had to use LibreOffice to format a simple
| document because Google Docs couldn't handle it.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Docs still can't handle large documents with a long edit
| history. It slows to a crawl. This has been an issue since
| at least 2013.
|
| We are talking about document sizes that Word for Windows
| 95 could handle.
| markstos wrote:
| Table of Contents navigator was recently added, I think
| "Document Compare" is fairly new.
| theptip wrote:
| Viewing BigQuery data from your Sheet was a pretty nice
| addition, circa Jan 2019.
|
| 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).
| uponcoffee wrote:
| The otherside of that coin is feature creep. Docs/sheets so
| their job fine, so aside from minor updates//fixes they don't
| need to substantially change; given their user based
| substantial redesigns should be their own product and if they
| prove to be substantially better then they can migrate away
| from the old docs/sheets
| lazharichir wrote:
| Erm, the explore tab in Sheets is pretty awesome for small
| businesses and people unfamiliar with Excel-like formula.
|
| Not sure when that was released, though!
| tyingq wrote:
| Looks like 2015: https://www.bettercloud.com/monitor/the-
| academy/google-sheet...
| [deleted]
| atarian wrote:
| The opposite end of this spectrum is a company supporting far
| too many different properties like Yahoo did. How do you strike
| the right balance?
| res0nat0r wrote:
| Most of it is just the HN echo chamber. Folks commenting that
| GCP my be shut down because it doesn't make as much money as
| Azure, totally oblivious to the fact that Google has billions
| invested in physical buildings and hardware being hammered on
| and built out around the world as we speak, just shows that
| folks here are out of the loop on this type of thing.
| zentiggr wrote:
| Aside from an easily dismissed hardware-backed GCP case,
| Google _does_ have a long history of useful and interesting
| ideas that launch, gain some users, look really useful if
| some effort is put into it, and get dropped instead. Even
| if some solid use cases are building.
|
| 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.
| cpeterso wrote:
| OTOH, Google doesn't like to invest big money in businesses
| that aren't on track to be big. From just nine months ago:
|
| "Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon,
| Microsoft in Cloud"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21815260
| res0nat0r wrote:
| That is the exact thread I have a comment in from ~9
| months ago. Anyone thinking that Google is going to shut
| down 24 physical datacenter regions spread all around the
| world if they're not #1 in the cloud market in 3 years is
| insane. The cloud market is multi billion dollar business
| and is only going to continue growing (even moreso now in
| the last ~9 months thanks to COVID). It isn't a free RSS
| aggregator that isn't maintained anymore and thus going
| to be sundowned.
| luka-birsa wrote:
| The funny thing is, I had a pitch by Azure to convince us
| to switch from GCP.
|
| And they point blank said that Google is not investing
| into GCP and implied that it's on a death bed.
|
| LOL
| res0nat0r wrote:
| Sounds like their salesman needs to work a little harder
| on his pitch. :)
| machello13 wrote:
| > Most of it is just the HN echo chamber.
|
| 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/.
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| From what I can tell, there isn't a single person in this
| thread claiming GCP may be shut down. And if there is, it
| certainly isn't a meaningful number of people.
|
| 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.
| res0nat0r wrote:
| Not in this thread, but it has happened a couple of times
| in the past any time Google products / GCP have been
| brought up, and that I've replied to saying that it is
| nonsense.
| [deleted]
| ashtonkem wrote:
| A good argument for being careful adding new products.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| They should release the financials of the app and let
| companies bid to acquire the app and its userbase. Smaller
| companies get a shot at growing the business, users stay
| happy(er than they would otherwise) and google gets a shot at
| acquiring the original idea back should it succeed under the
| hands of people who give a damn.
|
| Unfortunately, such a program would likely be sunset after a
| year.
| ebiester wrote:
| More importantly, this is all released on Google's internal
| infrastructure. Any such work would require moving to the
| external infrastructure, and the cost of it likely wouldn't
| make sense.
|
| 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.
| luka-birsa wrote:
| Getting paying customers is great for idea validation.
|
| If nobody wants to pay, you at least know that.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The way Google builds software makes that approach tough.
|
| 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.
| jfoster wrote:
| Well there's two things to say about that:
|
| 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.
| puranjay wrote:
| Google has more resources than Yahoo ever did
| Guest42 wrote:
| They can sunset things better that way customers have clearer
| paths forward.
| shallowthought wrote:
| I call it Promo-Driven Development. You have to launch things
| to get promoted at Google, but you're not going to get demoted
| for transferring to a better project afterward.
| president wrote:
| Just like that one engineer on your team that says yes to
| everything the manager does while writing the worst spaghetti
| code because he knows once he gets promoted/leaves for
| greener pastures, someone else will take care of the mess and
| he will be long gone by then.
| [deleted]
| claytongulick wrote:
| To be honest, this appears to be vastly inferior to Wrike, for
| example.
|
| 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.
| moneywoes wrote:
| How long till this is abandoned?
| flixic wrote:
| They could have launched yesterday, on a Monday(.com).
| zerkten wrote:
| When you were a SaaS startup in the 2000s no one took you
| seriously. Now, the big players have a better chance of
| responding in a timely fashion.
|
| 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.
| timmg wrote:
| I'm the Tables TL. I'd be happy to answer questions!
| generatorguy wrote:
| What are your thoughts on the fact that 90% of the comments
| here are something to the effect of "there is no sense in
| personally investing in using Tables since google will shut it
| down in x years"?
| timmg wrote:
| I never expected that kind of response from HN ;)
|
| 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.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Looking at 120 projects has anyone used or been interviewed on
| the https://byteboard.dev/ platform?
|
| It sounds interesting and I was wondering what people thought
| about it and how it works out in practice.
| ScoutOrgo wrote:
| Tangentially related, but google nixed android chrome's
| "home"/"duet" feature which allowed having the url bar at the
| bottom of the screen and made navigating on a phone/tablet _much_
| easier. I'm somewhat baffled how they can work on a tablet and be
| so unaware of what a good UI looks like.
| squaresmile wrote:
| I can't believe after years of fiddling with a bottom bar
| (Home/Duplex/Duet), they couldn't figure it out and just
| scrapped the whole thing. The killedbygoogle meme is probably
| exaggerated a bit but I feel like this whole saga just screams
| a lack of direction.
|
| 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.
|
| [0] https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/07/15/chrome-84/
| fmakunbound wrote:
| I'm afraid, there's no way I'm going invest time into that tool
| knowing that's it's likely going to be cancelled in a year or
| two.
| Just1689 wrote:
| What a useful app. Reminds me of Airtable in some ways. I enjoy a
| good flexible table app any day.
|
| 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.
| onion2k wrote:
| _I wonder if Google would get better adoption if they
| explicitly published what would be needed for them not to drop
| the product.._
|
| 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.
| gerash wrote:
| This is an experimental project obviously and has that Area120
| tag but I think there should be a uniform experimental
| logo/icon across all of Google products for any projects which
| is provided as is with no upfront commitment to long term
| support or sustainability.
|
| 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
| prlambert wrote:
| Just to confirm, the Area 120 labelling is meant to do
| exactly that. Area 120 projects do not have long-term
| commitments, explicitly. But the goal is for the successful
| ones to graduate to be a fully supported Google product and
| gain those commitments at that time (we have a number of
| examples of that happening).
| gerash wrote:
| IMO it's still not clear from a single glance. Either no
| Google logo anywhere near experimental stuff or a super
| visible uniform "Beta/Experimental" logo as long as a
| product has no long term commitment.
|
| 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.
| mh- wrote:
| I think sharing some of those examples might be helpful.
| clairity wrote:
| nothing will lead to better adoption, because, as others have
| pointed out, google has trashed its brand (at least among
| techies) because of structural issues like promotion-hopping
| and big game hunting (where, for example, a $50M business is
| just way beneath them).
|
| 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.
| prlambert wrote:
| [Disclosure I work at Google Area 120 and would be partly
| responsible for this type of decision]
|
| 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.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| This is the primary reason I don't use new Google labs tools
| any more. If there was an explicit "we guarantee this will be
| fully supported for X length of time and migration will be
| easy if we kill it" I would be far more likely to adopt new
| tools.
|
| 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.)
| someone7x wrote:
| Are all these comments about the near and inevitable death of
| your new product at all soul-crushing?
|
| I'm a stranger on the internet and even I can feel the burn.
|
| Good luck.
| shajznnckfke wrote:
| I'm sure the coming promotion/fat refresher for shipping a
| product helps ease the suffering.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Have they fixed the incentives yet? Or is it still "ship
| = good, maintain = bad," guaranteeing that the pattern
| continues?
| shajznnckfke wrote:
| I'm not sure the incentive is really wrong, although it
| sucks for the users affected. It's sort of like how VCs
| want startups to reach unicorn status or go bust trying.
| Google doesn't want to waste engineers running a
| lifestyle business.
| cflewis wrote:
| As a Googler, I'd just say it's a boring meme that shows
| little thought and just wastes time actually getting to
| interesting discussion here. It's almost akin to "first"
| from the old days of Slashdot or the race to mention
| generics whenever anything related to Go comes up.
|
| 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.
| antonvs wrote:
| It's not a "meme". It's a real fact that anyone who's
| considering depending on a Google product has to
| consider.
|
| It's also a consequence of the business models that
| Google has explicitly chosen, i.e. your employer has
| chosen to incur this reputation.
| mdoms wrote:
| There's that trademark Google arrogance we all know and
| love.
| lowiqengineer wrote:
| Really not helping the condescending Googler stereotype
| there bud. Or perhaps its OK for you to be this way as a
| tech "elite" that makes $450k a year.
| what_ever wrote:
| I don't see any condescending language in that comment.
| But with my disclosure, you will be quick to say, of
| course I can't.
|
| 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.
| lowiqengineer wrote:
| PHD graduate after a few years will easily make $450k.
| I'm sure OP does.
|
| Unlike me, he has absurd wealth. I'm lucky if I hit $200k
| after 3 years tenure at Amazon.
| cflewis wrote:
| Can confirm that I don't.
| lowiqengineer wrote:
| Well, nonetheless, the amount of privilege you wield is
| astronomical compared to me, and it's clear that you
| believe you're superior to me in every way.
| Unfortunately, you're probably right because I can't pass
| a top-tier tech interview.
| TheRealSteel wrote:
| Calling it a boring meme is condescending. It's
| dismissing people's concerns as a joke they made up for
| attention, rather than addressing and refuting their
| actual argument.
| what_ever wrote:
| Linking to killedbygoogle.com where more than half of
| things are not actually kiled by Google is not a good
| argument. I agree that products getting killed by Google
| is a concern and a few comment accurately point out and
| add to discussions while most of the others just keep
| repeating like a meme. Very rarely the discussion feels
| like a discussion.
|
| 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.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Oh no they used an ad hominem so you responded with an
| irrelevant whataboutism.
| what_ever wrote:
| Fair enough, removing that.
| TheRealSteel wrote:
| Your dismiss response has made me even more confident
| Google plans to immediately abandon this (as well as
| other services I might be interested in, including end-
| user ones like Stadia), not less.
|
| 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.
| cnlwsu wrote:
| Even if the complete public distrust of the companies
| ability to be reliable is "just a meme" it's brand
| damaging and creates a scenario that impacts adoption of
| new products.
|
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Could Google not commit to open sourcing projects in a
| maintainable way (public repos, k8s support versus just Borg,
| which no one has access to) and guarantee data export
| functionality as part of Takeout? This would significantly
| derisk attempting to use a fledgling Google service for end
| users.
|
| Definitely not a resourcing issue, entirely an organizational
| culture and philosophy decision to be made.
| pc86 wrote:
| I don't work at Google but my understanding is there are a
| _lot_ of proprietary, closed-source internal APIs that make
| this difficult-bordering-impossible.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Yes, Google wouldn't want anyone seeing exactly how
| thoroughly everything hooks into their data collection
| and ad targeting systems.
| [deleted]
| ashtonkem wrote:
| The only way to rebuild credibility is to do the right thing
| repeatedly for a long period of time.
|
| 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.
| andrewprock wrote:
| If they could just commit to maintaining Hangouts, they would
| go a long way to rebuilding trust. I know many school aged
| kids who joined Hangouts (though Google classroom IIRC) as a
| painless way to collaborate with classmates and friends. It's
| literally a gold mine for "next generation" social
| networking, but the fact that they are killing Hangouts means
| those kids are all finding their way to other feature rich
| platforms, like Discord.
| hackmiester wrote:
| If they say they need X users to not cancel something, that
| does nothing for me, even if I trust them. I will not sign up
| until it already hits that point, because before then, it's
| practically guaranteed to be canceled. And I bet at least X
| users would share my opinion.
| virgilp wrote:
| What surprises me, more than the ton of comments about Google's
| credibility, is that I suspect nobody even tried to get more than
| a superficial understanding of what the product is supposed to do
| and what differentiates it. Surely I can't be the first one to
| notice that you can't even find out what this product does? The
| value proposition is a series of images, but you can't look at
| any one image & absorb the details, because it auto-scrolls to
| the next image & there's no way to stop this behavior.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Why should I invest any time in a product which will diappear?
| Any time I spent looking into it, beyond just looking for ideas
| for my own products, seems like a waste of my time which I'll
| never get back.
| skipants wrote:
| Ha -- that's the exact same thought I had. It's also coupled
| with the fear that if I _do_ like the product I'll just be
| even more disappointed.
| uponcoffee wrote:
| It seems to be UI/UX for creating//editing//managing databases
| and interacting with them for non-programmers.
|
| 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.
|
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
|
| 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.
| nvrspyx wrote:
| In other words, it's an AirTable clone.
| beauzero wrote:
| Thanks for the heads up on AirTable. Hadn't seen it before.
| uponcoffee wrote:
| Appears so, I wasn't aware of air table until reading the
| other comments. Pretty much seals the grave on this one.
| Low effort clone from a company notorious for no customer
| support and killing services vs the original that
| specializes in this... easy choice
| sjg007 wrote:
| I thought it was an Asana clone?
| uponcoffee wrote:
| Asana is project management, kanban on steroids.
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| I thought it was a clone of Monday
| foobiekr wrote:
| It's interesting that it seems to be aimed at less technical
| users. Perhaps the google teams executing the POD [1] process
| now perceive that they have exhausted the pool of credulous
| technical users and are now trying to mine a new audience.
|
| [1] promo-oriented development
| Navarr wrote:
| Once you've signed in, they offer this video:
| https://youtu.be/tedTuOvS8Dw
| jfoster wrote:
| Sounds like spreadsheets where the data is more structured.
| Seems like a cool idea that could become a successor of
| spreadsheets. Even more convinced that Google will abandon
| it, though.
| virgilp wrote:
| Only if you're from US, I guess :|
| OJFord wrote:
| It sounds like Notion to me.
|
| https://notion.so
| nvrspyx wrote:
| More like AirTable
|
| https://airtable.com
| OJFord wrote:
| Maybe I'm missing something (because everyone's saying that
| and votes don't suggest anyone agrees with me) but having
| not looked at AirTable before... it also looks just like
| Notion?
|
| 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.)
| nvrspyx wrote:
| Notion has some AirTable-like functionality, but it's
| more focused on being a knowledge base rather than a
| database like AirTable and Google Tables.
|
| There's definitely some overlap with the two. This Google
| project is just more akin to AirTable than Notion.
| gowld wrote:
| It cool to create a "Area 120" space for new ideas. But
| what's the point of funding underfunded clones of old ideas
| instead of aquiring them?
|
| What is the most successful or longest lived Area 120
| product?
| ma2rten wrote:
| http://chasebase.com/ and https://grasshopper.app/
| sdfhbdf wrote:
| Chasebase.com domain is for sale.
|
| Are you sure this is what you wanted to link?
| ma2rten wrote:
| sorry, chatbase.com
| karmasimida wrote:
| I don't trust Google's commitment on maintaining this seemingly
| mid-size project.
|
| So I won't invest my time considering it.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Maybe we should just start doing what Google does, copy their
| products and all use that instead.
| drej wrote:
| This looks very similar to Notion (https://www.notion.so/).
|
| The one big difference being that I believe Notion will outlive
| Tables - especially as Tables is already touted as an incubated
| project.
| xmprt wrote:
| Looks almost identical except that Notion doesn't support bot
| actions. Once Notion builds an API and has support for things
| like IFTTT then we'll see it become even more powerful than it
| is today.
|
| 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.
| bryan0 wrote:
| We recently switch over a bunch of our internal doc systems
| (basecamp, trello, google docs, airtable) across many different
| teams all to Notion. I've been completely impressed with how
| great the software is. If anyone from the notion team sees this:
| kudos.
| brainless wrote:
| It seems like some folks at Google just woke up to Airtable and
| launched a counter MVP. I do not really expect more from Google
| any more. When there are tough competitors, why would people use
| something else which does not even look quite finished?
|
| Google has reach (read search monopoly), so I guess that is an
| angle.
| arkitaip wrote:
| Google should be inspired by their more nimble competitors!
| Their main problem is not offering Tables as part of G Suite
| where it would boost their offerings in the office productivity
| space and deliver a more complete and coherent strategy. That
| is, if they are really commit to Tables and are ready to offer
| proper corporate support and maintenance...
| fourstar wrote:
| This. I love the preamble about the author being in tech for
| awhile and 10 years at Goog as if that gives any credibility to
| a blatant rip off.
| arkitaip wrote:
| Interesting that they would launch this as a totally separate
| product and not as a part of G Suite.
|
| 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?
| gowld wrote:
| It's the reverse: GSuite products have a mandatory minimum
| level of support (and integrate with the Suite). Area 120 is
| for standalone products that have zero promise of support.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| "At Area 120, we work on 20% projects 100% of the time."
|
| It literally just has no backing by Google's corporate or
| business goals.
| paranoidrobot wrote:
| > "At Area 120, we work on 20% projects 100% of the time."
|
| I laughed at that, at first, thinking it were a joke.
|
| No, no that's a quote from https://area120.google.com/
| mey wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification, I also thought the parents
| comment was snark. Obviously that is not ocdtrekkie's
| fault.
| hobofan wrote:
| Google Maps was a 20% eons ago, wasn't it? So there is a
| chance that it becomes part of Google's corporate goals, e.g.
| making G Suite essential to businesses.
| solresol wrote:
| No, it started as a purchase of where2 and has had full
| time staff ever since google bought it.
| hobofan wrote:
| Sorry, after looking it up, I think I confused it with
| GMail.
| lallysingh wrote:
| To be fair, does that mean anything?
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| It means that the PM cares less about the users than the PM
| for a 100% time Google product cares the users, which is
| already very little.
| arkitaip wrote:
| Right but you can be sure that many people across several
| teams inside of Google have thought about creating a Airtable
| clone. Somehow Google greenlit this as a standalone product
| amongst many other options...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Somehow Google greenlit this as a standalone product
| amongst many other options...
|
| 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.
| baskire wrote:
| Aka we will kill this at any time.
| danudey wrote:
| "We exist only to design and launch products, which earns
| us huge bonuses, and not to actually maintain or improve
| them, which earns us nothing."
| marcinzm wrote:
| How is that different from the rest of Google?
| baq wrote:
| Risking comments that HN is becoming reddit:
|
| thatsthejoke.gif
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Honesty and self-awareness?
| asciimov wrote:
| The real question is can I import and export this to org-mode?
| ErrantX wrote:
| Like, why? I wonder sometimes why large corporations bother with
| stuff like this. OK I understand Gmail was a fantastic unicorn
| for Google and so might this be - but given that why risk using
| it?
|
| 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.
| user_501238901 wrote:
| Diversifying.
|
| 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
| ErrantX wrote:
| Which makes somewhat sense for Google (I mean, Gmail is the
| titular example right?). But Gmail is 16 years old, Gsuite is
| 14. Where is the next unicorn vs. the much more than twenty
| failed products to offset this?
|
| 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/
| plessthanpt05 wrote:
| Reminds me of the Pied Piper ad from Silicon Valley:
|
| https://youtu.be/dWOGbu5BcT0
| ohazi wrote:
| What's the difference between Google X and Area 120?
|
| Hard technology vs. apps/services?
| pawelk wrote:
| Aside from the bar being set at completely different levels
| ("making the world a better place" vs building fancy web apps)
| I guess graduating from X means being spun off as an Alphabet
| subsidiary, while successful Area 120 projects may see closer
| integration with Google's core products.
| [deleted]
| markstos wrote:
| This product appears to have an identity crisis.
|
| Is it like Google Spreadsheets, Google Forms? Trello? All three
| with some AI sprinkled on top?
| janlukacs wrote:
| A couple of years ago Asana stole our slogan, now Google.
|
| 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.
| daltonlp wrote:
| Are you sure?
|
| 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...
| wavepruner wrote:
| This is a basic combinations of words from the English
| language. You do not own it.
| janlukacs wrote:
| Are you serious? Is "Just do it" a combination of words in
| English? We don't own it because we're a small startup.
| bigbossman wrote:
| Meta-comment: it's hilarious how every other comment is about how
| Google is going to kill this project.
|
| Next time a VC asks you "what are you going to do if Google
| builds X too?" send them a link to this discussion!
| akerro wrote:
| I think it nicely shows lack of trust in Google and their new
| products.
| tmd83 wrote:
| Does anyone feels looking at Google's products lately that
| there's something tremendously wrong with the organization. I'm
| not talking about just dropping features but just quality of
| implementation and missing things that people should get fed up
| and do something during development.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| cptskippy wrote:
| Google Maps use to be a hell of a tool for exploration,
| navigation and travel. We used it on a tablet as we drove
| across Scotland in 2013 and it was fantastic. It provided tons
| of data about your routes and allowed you to easily manage your
| trip.
|
| 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.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Isn't that with all the products? New teams that own the
| legacy code base, new PMs that need to show they are doing
| something... That's how all software products rot. It's
| normal lifecycle of products that we need to accept.
| siphor wrote:
| it shouldn't have to be that way
| myth_drannon wrote:
| It gives an opportunity for newer, simpler and faster
| actors to come and replace the incumbents. Complex
| systems are hard to maintain. Nature spent billions of
| years perfecting the process, we can't be expected to
| learn it in couple of decades.
| bit_logic wrote:
| A small example of this I noticed recently: the Google Weather
| app (the one that's default in Android, at least for Pixel
| phones).
|
| 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?
| samblr wrote:
| Let's admit it.
|
| Google is on its way to become the new ____.
|
| IBM ?
| naringas wrote:
| they are quite a lot like Microsoft of the late 90s and early
| 00s
| samblr wrote:
| Strangely, why does a company like Google, wakes up so late when
| Airtable hits Series-D and not Series-A/B/C ?
|
| Looks like its straight forward product for somebody who makes
| google spreadsheets.
| ec109685 wrote:
| I wonder that too. Their gSuite products evolve soo slowly
| (when was the last time diagrams changed?).
|
| 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.
| danudey wrote:
| I was reading a post-mortem of Google Wave, and the author
| stated that Wave's problem was one of incentives.
|
| 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.
| haltingproblem wrote:
| It takes Google several years to wakeup, rub their eyes, brew
| some coffee, code it up and deploy it. You will be amazed how
| hard it is to not be lulled by the sweet sound of tens of
| billions in revenue adsense/adwords spews out every year. Why
| bother with anything else?
|
| 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.
| FirstLvR wrote:
| BTW Airtable is an amazing product, if this work then google
| will eat their customers
| ksenzee wrote:
| There's plenty of competition in this space - it's not like
| Airtable invented the genre. Smartsheet predates it by far and
| went public two years ago.
| partiallypro wrote:
| So, is this integrating with GSuite? Also will it have
| integrations with Salesforce and Slack/Teams? Otherwise, it's
| probably DOA for most orgs.
|
| 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.
| dgellow wrote:
| My bet is on 3 years, then it will be removed. Sorry for the
| people working on it, I wish you all the best.
| TheRealSteel wrote:
| I find it impossible to scrounge the smallest modicum of interest
| when this will inevitably, invariably be "sunset" within 12
| months with no migration path or support.
| crearo wrote:
| Apart from pulling the plug on products at random, why I'm
| sceptical is because this hasn't been introduced / used
| internally widely. Think of it like a product Google created, say
| Cloud, but doesn't use it itself. Oh wait. It doesn't.
| hiei wrote:
| Back in the day I would definitely be one of those early Google
| adopters, just to try the product. I don't bother anymore
| gogopuppygogo wrote:
| Sam here. Now, I don't try a Google product until some multi
| billion dollar startup that GV has invested into uses that
| product.
| mdoms wrote:
| Folks I'm just getting word that they're cancelling this product.
| desireco42 wrote:
| Funny. They totally deserve this btw. They will need to provide
| additional assurances for products. I agree we could use more
| assurances on product life.
|
| It is good product that can grow if it garners sufficient
| interest. I hope it does.
| athenot wrote:
| This looks a lot like a SmartSheet clone.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| _1tan wrote:
| Any idea when or if this will be available outside the US?
| ibdf wrote:
| Yeah... nope. If this goes as other google products, it won't see
| any updates, it won't get any new features - they will wonder why
| no one is using it and then kill it.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Apparently, "Area 120" is the Google Unit for products that
| launch without any textual explanation of what they are or how to
| use them, just low-information-density YouTube walkthroughs.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| So basically, 'where ideas go to die'.
| vyrotek wrote:
| Interesting. This is the first time I've heard of Area 120.
| Looks like they have their own site.
|
| https://area120.google.com
| mattkevan wrote:
| Think Google's obsession with machine learning has got out of
| control.
|
| 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?
| antonvs wrote:
| I doubt it's machine learning. GPT-3 could probably come up
| with more interesting sounding products than that.
| bransonf wrote:
| Just me or is that literally Airtable's exact UI? Sidebar on
| right, tabs top left...
| mlobl wrote:
| I've only heard of Airtable, and that was what popped into my
| mind too
| edoceo wrote:
| I <3 airtable. This is a low energy clone. Sad.
| mrspeaker wrote:
| $10 a month! This does look really useful, and seems like a smart
| move: I like AirTable, but if they integrate this into gsuite
| then I'm way more likely to use it for random things.
|
| 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?
| carliny wrote:
| Hey there! I'm the Tables PM and your comment caught my eye.
|
| 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, we really appreciate it!
| ashtonkem wrote:
| For how long? AirTable is a core part of some professional
| workflows, I wouldn't trust that with Google.
| Bloggerzune wrote:
| https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/07/hack-my-maths.html
|
| How to hack my maths this is going to be the first article of all
| the ones I've done on here and these are for actual.
|
| Natural quizzes not just for games, so the first thing you'll
| need is Firefox Programs.
|
| It's just Firefox, so the first thing that you want to do is
| you're going to click on the test you want to do so I'm only on
| practice here. Still, it works on homework two it's let's say I
| want to do this one click on it and try the homework or the
| worksheet and it should load up now what you're going to do is
| work out or work out one of them, so you want to find the easiest
| one and then yeah work it out so I'm going to do I don't.
| troelsSteegin wrote:
| What does this proof of concept prove? It looks to me like Tables
| = Sheets + some workflow automation (Bots) + some schema
| ("tasks") + some style sheet. Is this a stretch relative to what
| someone committed might do over GSuite today?
| crazygringo wrote:
| As a product, this looks super-cool.
|
| 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?)
| jjeaff wrote:
| While I am also annoyed by Google's discontinuation of
| products, I would guess that the failure rate of saas startups
| is still much higher than Google's cancel rate.
|
| 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.
| jiofih wrote:
| Google has discontinued a total of 205 products so far. I
| think their survival rate is pretty close to the startup
| average.
| panarky wrote:
| How many products has Microsoft discontinued?
| benatkin wrote:
| That isn't a guarantee. Google killed Inbox. They also
| regularly kill features, like community captions on YouTube.
| https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/31/21349401/youtube-communit...
|
| Also Reader and FeedBurner felt much like core services during
| their heyday.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| IIRC Inbox, Reader, and Feedburner were never core products
| of GSuite. Just consumer products that were popular and/or
| well-liked. That's different from being a core part of the
| GSuite applications:
| https://gsuite.google.com/intl/en_us/features/ .
| msapaydin wrote:
| openai gpt-3 beta private api is also becoming not free soon.
| kevas wrote:
| Uhhh what?
| pdx_flyer wrote:
| Exactly. Until it's part of the suite it doesn't have Google's
| full backing and no guarantee that they won't kill it.
|
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| You don't need to worry about Keep. It's part of G Suite core
| services, which means corporations have long-term contracts
| with Google that basically guarantees it stays around.
|
| 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.
| levesque wrote:
| Tell that to the early access crowd!
| baxtr wrote:
| Anyone remember Google Wave?!
| gpm wrote:
| Wasn't Google wave always a closed (with plenty of invites
| available) beta?
| solresol wrote:
| Fusiontables was part of G Suite until it was terminated.
| baskire wrote:
| > That's why we built Tables...as part of Area 120...for
| experimental projects.
|
| Yeah I'm going to pass. This will just be deprecated in the near
| future.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| Absolutely no way I'll be touching this. The second we have it
| integrated Google will deprecate it.
| human_error wrote:
| "At Area 120, we work on 20% projects 100% of the time."
|
| 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.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Is it deprecated yet?
| jbm wrote:
| I tried to give it a shot. Tables is, for reasons I cannot
| understand, geo-locked.
|
| > Tables is not yet available > The Tables beta is currently
| available in the U.S.
| mellosouls wrote:
| yes, annoying. possibly gdpr related?
| jbm wrote:
| I considered that but I'm in Canada.
|
| There is someone in every organization asking to minimize
| potential legal liability. It's a bit sad that the Chicken
| Littles have won again.
| gowld wrote:
| Why is an Issue Tracker tool named after a databse term?
|
| 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?
| burtonator wrote:
| PRESS RELEASE
|
| 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)
| [deleted]
| tyingq wrote:
| Yeah, they killed App Maker: _" The App Maker editor and user
| apps will be shut down on January 19, 2021. New application
| creation is disabled."_.
|
| And it's somewhat in the same space as Tables.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| Seriously, we're an enterprise G-suite customer and Google
| really does move too fast for us. It pisses off our executives
| when things change/get removed. We'll be migrating to O365,
| despite all its flaws and uptime problems.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > Google Tables has no migration tool or system for users to
| export their data angering some users.
|
| Weird. Last I checked, even when deprecations happen, the data
| is accessible via Takeout.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| This is often claimed, but more often than not, data provided
| by export features, and not just Google's, are in a format
| which makes it useless to non-programmers.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| That's going to be the common case; without knowing the
| end-target application, most data formats we would pick at
| random are useless to non-programmers.
|
| Even JSON is too complex for non-programmers.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Plaintext would not be 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.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Plaintext is too complex for programmers and likely drops
| semantic information that is needed to reconstruct the
| relations in the original data.
|
| 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.
| megous wrote:
| Good. I still remember when Facebook export was some shitty
| useless html garbage file, that didn't even include post
| types, or names of other people, or sensible structure
| (just a soup of <br> tags), or entity IDs, and was
| basically useless for about anything.
|
| 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.
| danpalmer wrote:
| This is a bit of an over-used joke.
|
| 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.
| lowlevel wrote:
| No joke. We have company policy now to not use google for
| anything.
| danpalmer wrote:
| For most companies this is a bit ridiculous. The UK
| government runs on Google Apps. Many schools and
| universities use Google Apps. Many large companies are on
| GCP.
|
| Unless you're a Google competitor there's likely no reason
| to exclude Google products.
| mattkevan wrote:
| Fair point, but why should anyone bother investing time and
| effort into using the thing if it's just an experiment?
|
| Certainly not going to shift my team or multiple teams onto
| it if I can't trust it's going to be there tomorrow.
| jfoster wrote:
| Google: Hey users, please commit your teams & projects to
| our new shiny product!
|
| Users: Hey Google, please commit to supporting your new
| shiny product for the long-haul!
|
| Stalemate. Google did this to themselves.
| danpalmer wrote:
| If you're starting a new team today, or a hobby project, or
| you have very little movement cost and low risk choosing a
| new service, then maybe you read this page, see a thing
| that this solves that has frustrated you about a previous
| tool, and you go for it. That's why a customer might choose
| it.
|
| 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.
| tomhoward wrote:
| They kill lots of things because they build and release lots of
| new things. It's a feature not a bug.
|
| (I'm not any kind of Google fanboy. Just bored of predictable
| takes like this.)
| totaldude87 wrote:
| THIS! , considering the news that they are sunsetting chrome
| payment api(ish), anyways.. Google used to invent a lot of cool
| products during their 80/20 rule i guess, and blockbuster hits
| like gmail, gchat and a lot came out, but only a very few left
| :(
| kgersen wrote:
| That was funny 10 years ago, may be.
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| What's funny is people acting like this is a joke. It isn't.
| Adding this to your workflow is asking for a headache in a
| few years when this gets shut down. Google currently has 5
| products that are shutting down between now and the end of
| 2021. https://killedbygoogle.com/
| JeremyBanks wrote:
| Now it's turned from a comic truth to a tragic truth?
| haltingproblem wrote:
| So much Google Hubris here. A day late and a dollar short with a
| heavy ladling of google self-importance.
|
| 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.
| atonse wrote:
| I agree about the pricing. The killer app would've been to just
| bundle it in with GSuite.
|
| That, and given Google's habit of cancelling novel projects, I
| just wouldn't trust this over a third party service.
| wrren wrote:
| I'd be extremely wary of adopting any new Google product given
| their tendency to abandon things that don't achieve immediate
| success.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I've been in this camp since Google Reader was Plus'd, then
| sunset, and then Plus itself was sunset.
| 0xfaded wrote:
| This comment seems to top any HN post regarding a google
| product launch so reliably that perhaps there should be a bot
| which automatically pins it to the top.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| A more useful bot would be one that finds and deletes that
| inevitably-posted noise.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's not noise, it's a valid market signal. So I'll side
| with automatically appending one such comment in every
| Google thread until their behavior visibly changes.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It's not noise
|
| 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.)
| jfoster wrote:
| If HN is interested in the success/failure of products &
| services, product-market fit and such, then what Google
| have done to themselves is a fascinating phenomenon.
|
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > If HN is interested in the success/failure of products
| & services, product-market fit and such, then what Google
| have done to themselves is a fascinating phenomenon.
|
| 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.
| whoisjuan wrote:
| This one in particular feels dead already... "An experimental
| product from Area 120 at Google"... yeah bro, you won't be
| around in a year.
| easton wrote:
| This isn't part of GSuite and therefore isn't subject to the same
| SLA. I wonder if the pricing will stick like this forever or if
| it will eventually be bundled, since Microsoft already includes
| something like this in 365 (and many companies probably already
| pay someone else for this type of functionality, like Airtable).
|
| 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.
| stephanerangaya wrote:
| Good point, yeah
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| "The Google incubator" is particularly accurate here, if you
| look at the tags on the blog: "Area 120". This is an app
| developed by one of their "let these people write random stuff"
| groups: https://area120.google.com/
|
| To my knowledge, nothing majorly successful or long-term
| supported has ever come out of Area 120.
| drewda wrote:
| > To my knowledge, nothing majorly successful or long-term
| supported has ever come out of Area 120.
|
| 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.
| throwaways885 wrote:
| Area 120 is definitely not a bunch of random people coming
| together. The projects there are fully funded and _do_ have
| corporate backing. They launch separate from the rest of
| Google, with the positive end result being absorbed by
| another team into a fully supported product.
| baskire wrote:
| Name one project that's lived long term that came out of
| a120?
|
| By lived I do mean no changes to end user for the
| absorption into another team.
| surajrmal wrote:
| Perhaps not a perfect example but Reply by Google
| seemingly got integrated into Android itself.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_(Google)
| mav3rick wrote:
| Grasshopper
| zerkten wrote:
| I'm surprised it isn't there from the start, but some
| flexibility to sell this into organizations which have other
| suites is probably valuable for getting a hook in. My guess
| would be that they'll move it into the bundle at some point,
| but if it fails they might be able to avoid the price of long-
| term maintenance.
| mrweasel wrote:
| It also makes you wonder: If this isn't part of GSuite, then
| where does it belong in the Google organisation?
|
| 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?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > If this isn't part of GSuite, then where does it belong in
| the Google organisation?
|
| 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.
| jfoster wrote:
| > 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.
| foxdev wrote:
| This looks promising! I'll try it in five years, or when Google
| commits to keeping it alive long enough for it to have a chance.
| martin_a wrote:
| Any bets on when this will be killed by Google?
|
| Maybe that's a concept for a startup. Betting on when Google
| dismisses new products.
|
| edit: mandatory link to https://killedbygoogle.com/
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| For the love of god, can we please stop naming things generic
| nouns that are impossible to find in a web search. Tables.
| Photos. Lists.
| foobaw wrote:
| I played around to see if this can actually replace Airtable.
| Because of its tight integration with Google apps (and how one
| day they could shutdown external Google Sheets API access), they
| probably have a decent advantage. Also free is good...Airtable
| pricing is not the most friendly/transparent for startups.
| invalidusernam3 wrote:
| Looks cool, but at the rate Google creates and kills projects I
| would avoid this
| vnchr wrote:
| Get ready to Google Wave goodbye
| mattkevan wrote:
| Time for it to face the Google Music.
| wil421 wrote:
| How many work trackers do we need? At my last job we a number of
| them doing small pieces. ServiceNow for ticketing, bastardized
| JIRA for bug tracking and agile tracking, planview for tracking
| hours to projects/initiatives, and another 2 Visual Task Boards
| that my team didn't have the displeasure of using thankfully.
| Sharepoint and Workday were mixed in for tracking edge case
| organizational stuff.
| lazharichir wrote:
| Very curious on how this versatile project will turn out. Google,
| with all of its collaboration tools like Sheets and Docs, really
| sucks at "Teams" (task and project management, for instance).
|
| 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.
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(page generated 2020-09-22 23:00 UTC)