Also these have been around a long time. Amazon has SNS for example. Those other services seem to do a little more, but as a user my take is that people want to send me about 10x the notifications I can receive.

I think there is a pretty big gap between what managers think is easy or hard and what developers think. That’s why there are so many ‘API integration’ products when coding against APIs is usually the easiest thing we do unless there is some complication such as complex authentication (e.g. A simple demo that takes 10 min to code up with any of 7 competitors takes 2 hours w/ Google Cloud and trashes your Python installation) or Microsoft’s SOAP.

I had worked on high-end search engines and that got me talking w/ about 20 ‘enterprise search’ vendors each of which offered 200+ integrations to get text out of everything from Salesforce to Mongodb. Only 1 however did systematic work to improve search quality. The thing is those ‘integrations’ are usually very easy to write for the run of the mill coder but the search quality work needs the attention of specialists that the vendor could justify but few customers could.