> Over the next two weeks we visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call “calculations.” Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table.
> What was I talking about? Oh yeah… most people just used Excel to make lists. Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible at creating tables, and everyone was using Excel for tables, not calculations.
If you view it from the lens that most Excel users employ the spreadsheet to create lists and tables (data organization), then Airtable is one way to improve that workflow.
If that's the target audience, then I see Airtable failing also. Surely 80% of the benefit of an excel spreadsheet, or google sheets, for a common user is how bare bones and simple to navigate the two products are?
"Oh hey, I just need to fire off some data rapidly in an organized way. Boop, done." And that's the trick, isn't it? The need to rapidly organize previously un-organized data. It's not a case of, "I know exactly how I want to rapidly organize some data."
With Airtable, it would be "I now have to navigate this decoupled spread out GUI and learn what all these abstract terms mean, when all I want to do is calculate how much we spent on ice cream last month."
In essence, it is making the workflow slower for those types of people.
On the other end of the spectrum, from a programmer's point of view, GUI's ALWAYS slow things down. This is why programmers who used VIM / Emacs were faster than those using modern IDE's. It's why hot-keys are important to both technical and non-technical workers. Presentation does not equal productivity. The presentation is what Airtable is pushing as the abstraction for non-technical users.
If the target audience for Airtable is instead small-business startups - then those startups are going to be in for a world of hurt when they need to get into real business development. They will have wasted time, energy, and resources to get set up on a lego platform that they'll need to migrate away from.
Looking at the pricing model and data limitations, there's nothing that would make this a better choice than just hooking up to AWS or something similar, directly. Using Airtable would require maintaining some form of middleware for SPA's...and there's no way in the world that you wouldn't be hitting their caps rapidly. Just an extra cost.
I'm not saying this product won't work well for a market niche, but that niche is a lot smaller than the buzz words thrown around in today's publications.
52M isn’t chump change in funding. Glad to know VC’s think it’s a big problem.
Personally I am working on an Airtable/excel like product but rather than a spreadsheet, you can easily make structured hierarchies. Think rows, which could have more rows, or link to other cells. A very easy way to capture relational data.
You can just start writing stuff in cells Define headings and data types later. Like git, it stores version history, let’s you work offline and let’s you sync with others. Let’s you upload markdown, or pictures and files into cells. Define a stricter schemas later. Restrict editing/viewing of cells based on formulas so others can’t easily break what you’ve created.
I wrote a little manifesto at orows.com and working on a prototype. Once I have about a 100 users, I plan to quit my job and work on it full time.
Think github, but rather than files, an object graph.
Using Excel spreadsheets multi user database instead of as a spreadsheet calculator is one of my pet peeves. Unfortunately it's also exactly what happens when organisations are lacking in processes and tools and less technical people have to try to make their own. So, I welcome any app that actually give people the multi user database that they actually need instead of e-mailing excel files to each other and losing track of versions.
Yes, people use excel to create databases without having to fuss about data-types and referential integrity (and without knowing they would even have to fuss about them).
> Over the next two weeks we visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call “calculations.” Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table.
> What was I talking about? Oh yeah… most people just used Excel to make lists. Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible at creating tables, and everyone was using Excel for tables, not calculations.
If you view it from the lens that most Excel users employ the spreadsheet to create lists and tables (data organization), then Airtable is one way to improve that workflow.