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!
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! :)
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... ?
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!
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.
https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/
You'll be fairly overwhelmed in reading it, I imagine.
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.
Google? It has to be a massive world spanning success or its a guaranteed goner.
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.
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.
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?)