However, I've got to be honest: while I'd play around with it while it's part of Area 120, there's no way I'd use it in a business until it officially became part of G Suite, as a core service. If Keep and Tasks are core services, then this needs to be too.
That becomes a guarantee that it'll stick around basically forever. So it's very exciting to see Google launch something like this -- but I hope they can align their internal politics and business goals here.
(Also, separate nitpick, but they're launching this as "beta", but with a paid plan. Since when is beta software charged for? What does "beta" even mean anymore then?)
I 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.
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!
A kanban central like this essentially contains a snapshot of the company and its direction, “outside”.
RBAC w/ segregation of duties on the admin side and least privilege assurances, audit trails, SOC2, HIPAA, etc. etc... ?
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.
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 use Keep to share lists with my spouse but even that I don't put anything important into because it could go away as quickly as it showed up.
Not to mention that Keep is deeply integrated with Gmail, Cal, Docs, etc.
No matter how lightweight of a tool it may seem, Keep isn't going away. G Suite is very conservative and careful with changes they make around their core services.
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.
Also Reader and FeedBurner felt much like core services during their heyday.
Since forever. I will concede that the cool kids call it "early access" these days, however.
Paraphrasing the video: Like sheets, but with structured data (columns define data types with relationships) and complex actions/triggers via bots.
Per your original comment, given Google's track record with customer performance//services being dead on arrival, I can imagine few here are interested in learning//migrating their workflow just to be locked out or migrating away not long after.
I'd link to the myriad of hn//twitter//medium posts used to get customer support through bad press, but I'm on mobile, I'll leave that as an exercise to the user.
[1] promo-oriented development
What is the most successful or longest lived Area 120 product?
So I won't invest my time considering 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.
Unfortunately, such a program would likely be sunset after a year.
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).
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.
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.
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 a stranger on the internet and even I can feel the burn.
Good luck.
Definitely not a resourcing issue, entirely an organizational culture and philosophy decision to be made.
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.
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
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.
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.
Because of these reasons I started Baserow (https://baserow.io), which is an open source (https://gitlab.com/bramw/baserow) alternative to Airtable and the listed tools above. It is still in an early phase, but every week new features are implemented.
Some unique points:
- Unlimited rows.
- Open source, released under the MIT license.
- Uses popular frameworks like Django and Nuxt.js
- Uses PostgreSQL as database backend.
- It can be self hosted.
- You can have many rows per table, 100k+.
- Headless and API first.
- Supports plugins.
https://gitlab.com/bramw/baserow/-/tree/develop/web-frontend...
They do use Nuxt, a fullstack framework for Vue.js, which is style-agnostic.
Do you think they want to create some distance between them and the rest of Google because ofd Google's reputation of shutting down products? Or maybe they want to launch a product outside the usual bureaucracy?
It literally just has no backing by Google's corporate or business goals.
I laughed at that, at first, thinking it were a joke.
No, no that's a quote from https://area120.google.com/
I'd be a little scared of paying for something in the Google incubator, knowing how they cull stuff that isn't popular. But maybe it'll be successful and go into the bundle.
If Tables is just it’s own thing, not related to search, GSuite, GCP or ads then it’s already dead. At some level it must suck to know that you’ve created a culture where people don’t even care to try out your new fancy gizmo, because they expect you to abandon to quickly it’s simply not worth investing you time in. Or does Google not know that how they’re perceived?
I suspect if it were to ever emerge from the “internal incubator” Area 120 is described as, it would become a GSuite feature.
> Or does Google not know that how they’re perceived?
I think Google knows that people in certain circles talking nothing but that view. They probably also have real stats on how their experiments are picked up and used, and I suspect they aren't at all what the people who think that the perception you refer to do instead public consciousness would predict.
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.
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)
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.
And it's somewhat in the same space as Tables.
Weird. Last I checked, even when deprecations happen, the data is accessible via Takeout.
(I'm not any kind of Google fanboy. Just bored of predictable takes like this.)
It took something like AirTable to wake the sleeping giants, that people wanted a low-code tabular data editor and storage engine, that wasn't really a spreadsheet. You know.. like FileMaker or MS Access.
I guess this goes to show something - I have thought for many, many, many years of building such an application in the cloud (having built "application generator" type applications in the past) - but, it may not have mattered if I had - because the big players might just come in and clone/copy it. It will be interesting to see how companies like AirTable can compete (and really hope they can).
I think we are crawling towards a future of low/no-code - or the dream of the world of 4GL [2] (or perhaps even beyond that) is coming closer and closer. Regarding 4GL, "those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it". Not saying it's a bad thing to be revisiting this, but it has been low-hanging fruit for so long now, you wonder why it took so long for the big companies to engage with it seriously.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-list...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_...
My employer gives me Lists as part of Office 365. It's one of those things that sounds good as long as you're reading about it and not using it. It's just not a competitor to AirTable. Not that I use AT either, because I'm not going to pay that much for what I'd use it, but Lists is pretty bad. The look and feel makes me think Lists is a Perl CGI app from 2001.
I have it too at my workplace, and other than a coat of paint on Sharepoint Lists, I concur, it is not amazing.
I guess I brought it up because it shows Microsoft being driven to do something, but much like Google, falling short of the target. Still, before AirTable and similar things, the giants were generally ignoring this area.
Friendly reminder that low/no-code is just newspeak for "COTS"
Looks like its straight forward product for somebody who makes google spreadsheets.
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.
Ironically, unlike desktop software when you had to convince people to purchase a new copy each year, it seems like the Cloud distribution model allows google to basically put their products in maintenance mode indefinitely since people will still be paying for the subscription each month and switching cost is high.
At Google, they said, you get significant bonuses, promotions, and prestige for launching a brand new product, especially to large fanfare or hype. Conversely, you get little to no bonuses, promotions, or prestige for maintaining that product long-term.
That means that Googlers have huge incentives to create and launch promising projects, and then immediately transfer off that project to some other new project to create and launch that, leaving some other team to maintain it, thanklessly.
This means that, in the absence of top-down direction from the executive level, GSuite will remain effectively stagnant forever, with minimal, if any, improvements. In my experience managing IT for a small startup that used GSuite extensively, this was generally true; the service as a whole was "promising", but had huge gaps in functionality or integrations that would never be addressed (like being able to back up/export a user's data without having to log in as them and request a Takeout file).
Another example is Google Inbox; again, a new-ish project, launched to much fanfare and rave reviews, but once it's launched, who cares? So it was "integrated into" regular Google Mail inbox, except it wasn't because the team doing the integration isn't going to get those huge bonuses for doing all that work so why bother?
I'm not 100% sure that this is true; again, I "read it in a thing that someone said", for all the validity that has, but it would certainly explain why so many of Google's products feel 80-90% finished, and have for a decade or more.
In this respect, I've effectively given up on Google ever improving anything, unless doing so will help stifle the competition's growth. Improve Android to counter iOS? Sure. Improve Google Docs to counter Microsoft Office? Nah, we're mostly dominant there already.
Like hangout > chat, let's drop the existing feature of read receipt that is even more important in the remote/work world in a product geared toward business.
Let's do an integration of task & files in chat in gmail but not what's suppose to be the primary app the standalone chat.
Let's take 3 release to decide yes there is some usefulness to wireless scanning and we can put it as an advance option.
It's not just dropping produces, it's actually degradation of function as if just to bump up the changelog size.
Since then they've gradually removed useful features, cluttered the UI with crap, and dumbed everything down to the point where it's almost useless. At one point they even removed the map scale, I think you have to enable an option buried in a menu to bring it back.
It's gotten so incredibly slow and clumsy to use that it's not even worth it half the time.
Google Photos is rapidly heading in that direction. They seem to be distancing you more and more from your photos and trying to throw their services in your face.
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?
Next time a VC asks you "what are you going to do if Google builds X too?" send them a link to this discussion!
Also, "send them flowers every product birthday to thank them for validating the product and growing my future customer base."
“Wait.”
Interesting to see it being paid though! The free tier seems very limited for a google product: 1000 rows, 100 tables, 50 bot actions... paid version is $10 a month. 1000 rows won't be enough for anything serious - so they must be really betting on people paying. I guess that's also why it's not integrated directly with GSuite?
I really appreciate that feedback for us, and we're really hoping to make it as useful as possible for you and others! :) As prlambert@ mentioned in another comment, we're kinda like a startup and if things go well, the goal is graduate into larger parts of Google.
A point of clarification on the free tier: we're offering 1000 rows per table--an individual tab within a workspace--which we hope offers a lot of flexibility in mixing and matching data in a workspace to track your work together. If there's particular use cases you have that involve over a 1000 rows, we'd love to hear more about it. Thanks for taking a look at the product!
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.
I don’t mind trying experimental personal tools, but I really don’t want to get a whole team of people reliant on this thing, just to see it get cancelled like the hundreds of other projects Google has killed over the years.
A paid support option would be nice too - I think I saw something about a paid “support for ANY Google product” option earlier this year but I can’t find it just now.
Then you soak up all the customers who still wanted it.
Works damn near every time.
Why do I care it is from Area 120? Why even share that branding - it just adds to the confusion. Is this an internal startup? Will it disappear? Stick around?
I already pay for Gsuite, now I should pay for this? Does it work in my gsuite org? Why would I not just go with Airtable at that pricing. How long will it stick around? Why is the feature list so much smaller compared to Airtable? What is their product road map? Why as a business user should I invest in this?
Come on Google, play for keeps, don't just dabble.
That, and given Google's habit of cancelling novel projects, I just wouldn't trust this over a third party service.
https://tables.area120.google.com/u/0/about#/
I am trying to read the screenshots! Quit advancing the slide show to the next screenshot after 5 seconds. I have clicked on "Project & task management" so that I can read that screenshot. That was your (missed) cue to pause the cycling of the slides.
I get that you want to tease the reader by offering several different interesting images that they'll see without scrolling, but maybe after you've captured their interest, it would be nice if they could move to the next step and actually look at the images.
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.
Google has reach (read search monopoly), so I guess that is an angle.
If Google doesn't think it's worth putting the full G Suite backing behind this, then I wouldn't trust it beyond a fun thing to play with.
> Tables is not yet available > The Tables beta is currently available in the U.S.
There is someone in every organization asking to minimize potential legal liability. It's a bit sad that the Chicken Littles have won again.
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.
It sounds interesting and I was wondering what people thought about it and how it works out in practice.
We've been actively working with many different companies (Betterment, Lyft, Figma, Dropbox) who have used Byteboard to ensure a more practical interview that is more relevant to the job. We have a candidate NPS of 4.1 / 5 which we are really proud of. :)
You can also check our twitter https://twitter.com/BrentA1283/status/1301918622873460737 to hear more from candidates who have tweeted at us about their experience!
I have a wider question too; large organisations spend millions building internal tools like this (and for a plethora of other things technical and project related). None of which are market leading and all of which progress steadily to abondonware...
It feels like once a corporation has gotten to that point its just too large and lost its core focus. I've seen (recently) pivots from poor UI's and interfaces to integrating one great SAAS tool with another great SAAS tool - because both the SAAS figured out all that stuff ages ago for you... at 10% of the cost.
Simplified: If you spend $1 million each on ten projects, each of which have a 90% chance to fail and 10% chance to bring in $100m in profits, then it is absolutely worth it
And more to the point; are these projects "failing" because savvy companies are working out that the play is short term seeking either high growth or death...
EDIT: 205 https://killedbygoogle.com/
For the record, https://www.paymoapp.com (work management) was the first to use Work better, together. Really annoying that they don't do at least a bit of research.
It looks you started using to this slogan in 2019. Prior to that, it was "Work Happy": https://web.archive.org/web/20181116030147/https://www.paymo...
But there was at least one other business using "Work better together" in 2017: https://web.archive.org/web/20170515171057/https://projectin...
It is good product that can grow if it garners sufficient interest. I hope it does.
The one big difference being that I believe Notion will outlive Tables - especially as Tables is already touted as an incubated project.
But I was surprised to find relatively basic features (like find/replace in page or a shortcut to find in table) missing so hopefully Notion's team will get around to implementing those soon.
The other comments about viability and long term support of Google's experimental products are very valid. But if it can help light up a fire under SmartSheet to improve their interface, that's not a bad outcome.
Looking at some of the other announcements on their blog, there's no way that an actual human either wrote those headlines or came up with the product ideas in the first place:
* Fundo: a virtual experiences platform for creators
* Shoploop: an entertaining new way to shop online
* AdLingo Ads Builder turns an ad into a conversation
* GameSnacks brings quick, casual games to any device
Has anyone been round to their offices recently to see if they're okay?
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.
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.
Hard technology vs. apps/services?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is it like Google Spreadsheets, Google Forms? Trello? All three with some AI sprinkled on top?
Maybe that's a concept for a startup. Betting on when Google dismisses new products.
edit: mandatory link to https://killedbygoogle.com/
Yeah I’m going to pass. This will just be deprecated in the near future.
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?
