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?)
Hey there! Tables PM here -- thanks for writing an honest opinion about what factors you're considering before wanting to use it for a business; I really appreciate that feedback and it's very helpful for us to hear.
I know our team would love to have people try Tables for lightweight work tracking use cases, even if it's not for a mission-critical business need. At the end of the day, we want Tables to help people and businesses make work a little easier, especially with covid forcing many to digitize and work remotely. If we're able to create a lot of value, that'll make for a strong case to graduate Tables into a larger Google product area, and we're only going to be able to do that with feedback from folks like yourself who can apply a healthy dose of objectivity. :)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this, and we hope you'll give Tables a little time (even Keep took several years before finally joining G Suite)! I'll also take that feedback on the "beta" label back to the team.
Well nice job carliny in launching it, well done! And good luck.
I could see a lot of small groups adopting this -- college extracurricular groups, a team at a church, friends organizing a short film -- and if you're focusing on usage metrics, that whole universe could prove to be far larger than the business market, at least before it's included in G Suite. Think of how many people use Forms+Sheets for that stuff right now.
However, my $0.02 would be that, right now, if I were one of those, I'd look at the landing page and assume that I'd quickly run into a limit and be tricked into paying $10/user/mo., so I'd avoid even trying it out. The 1,000-row limit seems like something I might easily run into, for example if I were simply importing all the alums from the organization's 30-year history.
I wonder if you couldn't come up with a better separation between free and paid that didn't depend on storage, but solely on features? For example, imagine if Sheets were free but charged if you wanted to use pivot tables and database connectors -- something like that. (Also, total storage is hard to estimate in advance, perhaps better to have a limit on attachments per-row? E.g. 64 KB, and it will automatically convert images to JPEG with lower quality/resolution as necessary? Otherwise everything is stored as a link to someone's Drive file?)
I just think if you communicated this as "100% free" but then with a "paid business integration add-on" or something, people would be a lot more willing to try it out. Again, best of luck!
Absolutely, we're really hoping that Tables can be great for all those smaller groups and use cases as well. The feedback on your impressions of the landing page is really helpful; I'll take that to the team and see if we can improve on that.
For some context on the tiers, I agree that storage is becoming a commodity and may not be something to gate on too heavily. For some quick insight, we did an analysis and the vast majority of lightweight work trackers (not for a serious business use case) had far below 1000 rows/records in them, so we left it with that limit to mitigate abuse, and then give 10x in the next tier (plus, we only charge for a single license, not by # of collaborators). That said, your point about making it easier for people to just jump in and get started is very valid. Thanks for giving me and the team some food for thought, we'll noodle on this and see how we can improve the messaging! :)
Hey Terretta, great question. Tables is already built on standard Google infrastructure so we have many of the default security and privacy protections built in.
From a user-facing standpoint: Tables is really geared towards being more user-friendly than the traditional DBA type tools, so the sharing model aligns more closely with Google Drive, and offer similar permissioning roles like "Editor", "Commenter", and an additional "Writer" role for collaborators who should be able to edit the rows, but not the table schema itself. We also have table and row-level change history baked in, and while we don't specifically offer an audit trail within the app, users can implement a version of that themselves using our bots. We're also working to support the ability to use bots to essentially automate GDPR compliance, by having bots that will automatically delete table rows that are >X days old.
From a customer-to-Google standpoint: we are very serious about your data privacy and security. We're not currently rubberstamped for HIPAA/SOC2, but we're already in the process of going through the internal reviews for FEDRAMP and HIPAA compliance. We do not at this time have advanced enterprise admin controls for customers, but it's absolutely coming in the future (we are only 1-day old to the public :).
We're not going to have all the angles covered, but we're working towards it!
When will Tables be added to G-Suite as a core product? Time frame? Gating factors?
Adopting a new workflow and project process is a massive investment in data conversion, adoption, training, and internal politics. For those reasons, my teams would need to know to a high degree of certainty that our efforts will be rewarded with a long term, well supported service.
Congrats on launching and I'll be watching to see how things go for this product.
Google's internal politics and business goals are well aligned for their employees.
Adsense/Adwords spews tens of billions of dollars in profits every year. Google's political economy incentivizes groups to build new products not for their revenue streams but to claim larger bonuses of the ad-revenue pie. The users who buy into these "new" products are just cannon fodder in that game. Remember Google+? Vic Gundotra made off with probably tens of millions or more to launch a failed product.
Almost anything MSFT releases in response to Google or competitors is inferior but MSFT's products are preferable due to implied longevity. MSFT has inoculated themselves against this parasitic political economy while Google and its users are held hostage by it.
I agree with the first part, however Microsoft has been competing extremely well and has released very good products through both acquisitions and internal development.
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.
"Conservative" is one way to say it. Perhaps another way to view it is that development of some G Suite core apps has stopped [0], which should perhaps give one pause.
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.
There have been well more than 205 failed startups in the last 10 years and so many more since G started. Google kill count is high but startup failure is much much higher
The difference is that originally there was a higher likelihood of trying out a Google product than a random startup's. Now that equation is flipped- I'd rather try a random startup's product than a Google one- at least the startup is going to live and die on making that product a success.
Google? It has to be a massive world spanning success or its a guaranteed goner.
> at least the startup is going to live and die on making that product a success.
I'm going to respectfully disagree.
Whether a product is being funded by Google or a VC, I'd argue they have a similar desire to make money, or else cut funding.
If a product looks like a failure, the startup isn't going to keep it going or try harder -- the VC's will want to cut their losses.
I honestly don't think there's much of a difference at all. It's the same types of executive tech people making the decisions at the end of the day no matter if it's at a VC or a Megacorp.
I thought that would be understood implicitly - how many google products do you know, maybe 10 to 20? That’s a < 10% success rate, pretty comparable to startups in general.
We aren't comparing Google with random startups picked blindly though. I can only speak for myself, but any startup product I use gets chosen after a bunch of research, into their track record, their user interactions, their apparent stability, etc. While none of that can guarantee startup success, I'm more confident in going with a startup product that has been selected this way, than with Google.
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/ .
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Other than the major ERP/CRMs there was very little COTS that was as extensible and programmable as these low-code solutions. I think low-code term may have some mileage as its easier to say than "extensible like an ERP, but without the ERP".
You're thinking of things in terms of how they function rather than the value they provide - from a business value perspective COTS and low-code are identical, its just that low-code used to be GUI desktop apps, now they're GUI web apps.
It's much more than gui web apps, it also includes native mobile apps, headless services, integrations, etc.
And from a business value they're very different: COTS you do not want to modify/adapt to your busines, otherwise you get problems upgrading, etc. Low-code is often used to innovate and differentiate, as a programming layer to quickly change COTS to your business needs.
>COTS you do not want to modify/adapt to your busines
This is redefining a term after the fact to suit marketing needs of the new term - with the except of bespoke solutions, it has always been possible to adapt COTS products - have you not seen SAP? Dynamics? Even Excel is COTS
Yes you can modify SAP, but upgrading then becomes very hard. Many companies are stuck at old versions of SAP because upgrading it, including migrating all the customizations, is very expensive and takes a lot of time.
I would consider Excel a no-code/low-code (pretty complex macros in there + vba) platform.
It isn't at all. Salesforce and Netsuite for example don't offer you the option of getting left behind. They might break you, and you can postpone some upgrades/migrations, but not forever.
I'm in agreement - low code these days seems to be somewhat 4GL and somewhat beyond - "visual programming" or "visual development". Kind of drag-and-drop with some light scripting mixed in possibly.
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.
The correct answer to that is "build a frictionless transition feature so that when they cancel the product we can pick up all their paying customers with no acquisition costs."
Also, "send them flowers every product birthday to thank them for validating the product and growing my future customer base."
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?
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...
> 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.
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.
I've used G Suite exclusively for something like 7-8 years now. The core products (Docs, Sheets, Slides) are rock solid and well integrated, and I've never found myself missing a feature. The drawing tool (what is it even called? Draw? Drawings?) is a bit of a toy, but there are plenty of alternatives.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
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.
You know what would help, Google? Slightly incentives early adopters somewhat, with perks in the same product if you sign up early enough.
Google Apps (precursor to G Suite) effectively did that. Free plan was 100 users at first. Maybe even higher. Then it got reduced to 15 or something. Then 5. Then they removed the free plan, for new signups.
I am pretty happy to be on a 100 user plan, I know I would easily pay $15-25/month for a few containersed Google accounts with my own domain names.
But because I signed up early as a Google adopter, and I get a little discount in a way. That's cool, and made me happy to be an early adopter.
You should try to do the same for new products. Maybe for the first adopters, offer them 10 paid seats for lifetime of their account, for free.
The future revenue cost is small because early adopters are just viral advocates (you want them!); and the developer/techie market can set trends.
$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?
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!
Cool. I would migrate my personal bookmarks to Table, and you how it can grow through the time, actually I have 6k records. Another real use case is tracking compliance recommendations for simple teams operating in 300 locations around the world, I would assign 200 tasks per office that staff must follow up each 6 months for 4 periods, just need to use a couple of process flow triggers in order to make it operative. To me this kind of tools like Table, Airtable, MS Lists, are way more than project management, may fit any low-no-code mvp where you just need to crud, use fast filters, identify records visually easy, automate approval mechanism and archive records when completed for future audits. IMO there are more hacker user cases where you just need to store gathered/enritched information that you want to access human friendly (even from an app) without having to build a frontend client, 100k free records would be acceptable if Google decides to go very generous with the ordinary Maker, anyways how much cost store 1000 records? This is something you can measure in money at Google?
Congrats, I hope this product comes to life and be the next must-have tool, I think they will be super cheap in the future anyways because lack of unfair advantage, it's a platform that just need to be ready to be integrable with all existing apis and that have the ability to execute lambdas. But has to be secured otherwise not recommended to be used with sensitive info, I would trust in Google since I use Gmail for my personal things.
I wouldn't surprise when Soho comes with something similar.
That's really helpful to hear, thanks for the examples. I definitely agree that there's potential for supporting use cases beyond just simple work tracking, and into more advanced workflows, and I'm hoping that we'll be able to make Tables useful for some of those use cases in the future too.
Thanks for the kind words, and I hope Tables will help people and businesses in positive ways as well! From my perspective, we just want to offer a decent option for users who want to track team work within the Google ecosystem, especially during this time with covid forcing many businesses to digitize and work remotely.
Thanks for sharing those use cases and we'll take that feedback on the limits back to the team.
I tried this out, and it reminds me a lot of AirTable. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. The easy import from Google Sheets made trying it to out in something that would be a meaningful context pretty painless. Here's the deal though: I can't see myself investing my time/energy in using this seriously if it's not part of GSuite. I don't see my company paying this pricing for this, and I don't see this as having the longevity enough to integrate into business processes unless it's part of GSuite.
What I see so far seems decent, but to make this something I'm actually going to rely on and build on, it needs better placement in Google's portfolio.
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.
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...
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.
It looks like an internal incubator (i.e. small startup-ish group). I would treat products from such teams with a grain of salt. I've had previous experience with such teams and projects at another large software company. I think such groups are a way for large, lumbering companies to test out new ideas in the market, with the full expectation that they will likely not be hugely successful. In the off-chance that they are, then the BigCo will put more resources into it. I think that's why you typically see very few marketing resources or support for such things. I suppose from that perspective, it really is a "startup", although they don't have the hunger that a real startup would, since if the projects fails, I doubt people would be out of jobs.
If Google doesn't think it's worth putting the full G Suite backing behind this, then I wouldn't trust it beyond a fun thing to play with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Hey jbm, Tables PM here, your comment definitely resonated with me.
Fun fact: I'm Canadian! :P On your point though: as my own opinion, there's some very smart people here trying to make sure we're doing things in a safe way that protects both our users and our team, and so sometimes we're asked to start small. As a result, we're doing what we can to offer something useful for people and businesses during these covid times, while still respecting the boundaries that we've been given. I, like most PMs, hate red tape, but I also appreciate it for the dangers it protects us from. :)
All that said, we're definitely hoping we can offer Tables to more people in the world, so stay tuned!
Yeah, to give you my perspective on this for a second: the reality is that the rules for how we work with and protect user data continues to evolve and become more nuanced with the different regulations from different countries. Not to mention, taking payments in different countries and currencies has a lot of implications! For every country we release to, there's a bunch of potentially new rules to follow, so it's a lot simpler and safer to do it with just one country first, get it right, and then expand after that. In my experience, there's no particular opinion that users from a particular country are "unsafe," but it's more about whether we have enough time and people to make sure we're doing things right by our users.
Hope that gives you a little insight into this and how we think about it!
Hey there, that would certainly simplify the aspect of payment, but to be clear, there are also data governance rules that vary by country, irrespective of whether we're collecting payment or not. We definitely considered that option as well, but ended up going down this path for now. We hope we'll be able to expand access before too long though!
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.
[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.
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.)
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.
No, you get a thick skin pretty quickly as a Google PM (and come to think of it as a Twitter PM too, my former job). Constructive comments are helpful and even the raw frustration I know is coming from a genuine place. Having your tools disappear sucks. I feel that too.
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.
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.
The point is, what differentiates products that come out of this project from another startup that is also struggling to stay afloat? If the answer is nothing, then why should anyone treat you any differently (because those other companies also get hit hard on that point)? Why shouldn't customers be weary about relying on your products if there isn't a commitment? You are free to call it a boring meme, but to me, these are very valid concerns. Sorry, you don't get a free pass because you're Google, and IMHO it should get scrutinized even more because its from Google for obvious reasons (poor privacy, track record of poor UI performance, s/w is often sluggish/resource hog, etc, etc)
>Then you have a company like Microsoft that keeps things around in perpetuity, but sometimes to the chagrin of users who want new features added or you get incongruent UX (you can still find plenty of very old apps in Windows 10). And this is fine too, but it's not a meme and so never comes up.
I'm not exactly the biggest fan of MS, but our company has saved tens of thousands of dollars in software costs because we could use old software designed for Win XP/7 on Win 10 w/o re-buying the software from the vendor. (Biotech s/w costs can get super crazy, esp with 21CFR validation)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”?
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.
> we think there is a real need for this kind of product.
I believe the comments covered that as well - this feels like a new flavor matching existing products. With the lack of trust in Google to keep it alive, combined with the fact that it just doesn't look to be innovative... it simply does not sound compelling.
If we got it wrong and there is more to it than "Google's attempt at AirTable", then perhaps the communication on what this product is supposed to be has missed the mark.
> If we got it wrong and there is more to it than "Google's attempt at AirTable", then perhaps the communication on what this product is supposed to be has missed the mark.
You say Airtable. Others have said Monday.com. Others have said Asana and Notion, etc.
The fact that there are a lot of products in this space -- in my opinion -- shows that there is a real need. It also shows that no one has quite got it right. Of course there are similarities between our product and others. "Tables of data" is not a new concept. "No-code" is not new.
This launch is our first step. We expect to grow with our users. And we hope we can delight them.
Interesting, but it seems a bit behind compared to the market. I'd much use ClickUp as the UI is much more appealing. Notion/Airtable too. Feels a bit like Chat vs. Slack. I'd rather use Slack any day of the week because rather than just one Google team the entire company is working on improvements and will do better over time. Not trying to s* all over Google, but there are better options for that price point.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The carousell of screenshots is metaphor for the product itself i.e. once you start paying attention to the product, just like the screenshots, it'll disappear
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.
Tables PM here; your comment caught my eye as it had an interesting point about the Sheets API access changes that are coming. We do offer an API and while Tables isn't intended as a replacement for Sheets in any way, we're hoping it might be useful for folks who do need a lightweight database for their work. :)
I wanted to be fair and call out that Airtable also has a free tier (and API), and they offer a lot of great features and functionality as well that can be great for startups!
At the end of the day, you should use what fits your needs best. I wanted to create Tables because our team didn't have a great work tracking tool that quite fit our needs, and it felt like we could help other Google apps users and businesses too (especially during this time of remote working with covid). I hope you'll get to make your work life simpler, no matter whichever tool you choose.
We've been actively working with many different companies (Betterment, Lyft, Figma, Dropbox) who have used Byteboard to ensure a more practical interview that is more relevant to the job. We have a candidate NPS of 4.1 / 5 which we are really proud of. :)
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?
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
> It is a necessary lens to view any new Google product through, though.
No, it's not.
> There is a real risk that they will abandon anything they launch.
There is a real risk that any company will do that, either by internal choice, or by change of plan due to acquisition, or by business failures. It really isn't necessary or helpful for people who have no interest in Google products because of their view of the brand (whether for this reason or any other) to pollute every discussion thread about a Google product with this.
The products themselves are often very interesting. The next step in consideration is whether they are fit for purpose, though. Google have made a reputation for themselves for abandoning their products/services, but at the same time anyone pragmatic will realise that they won't abandon everything they launch. So if you're interested in taking up a Google product, you will then consider whether it's one of the products/services that they are likely to continue supporting or not.
I think it's highly predictable. Where in their org does it fit, how much have they invested in it, how big is the opportunity, etc.
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.
You are right, we started using it in 2019. From what I know none of the apps in our space had this slogan when we decided to use it and we did quite a lot of research, but to be fair I did not know about the existence of Project Insight in 2017.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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 :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For instance, consider email or newsgroups formats, with key-value attribute headers, with the difference of putting them at the bottom of the file.
With each "item" being a text file, you could easily fit the average person's Facebook profile into a zip file of (folder-arranged) text files with the content at the top and the extra attributes (e.g. timestamp, reply-to, etc.) below.
Even for someone very active, this would only be several hundred text files per day, so several hundred thousand per year, and several million for an entire profile. With that many, you'd probably have to split them up, but for the average person with maybe several hundred thousand, that's a manageable number of textfiles to put into a zip file.
These textfiles could be almost trivially imported into a relational database with a simple script.
At the same time, the user can also browse the contents of the zip file if the folder structure is arranged thoughtfully.
Of course, I am talking about text only, not images or videos. For these, you would have to either use metadata or have a matching text-file to go with the file.
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/
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?)