Anthropic is playing in Alphabet's field

Is that really a smart idea with respect to the IPO? Why not leave the risk and reward of building slop on top of AI to the industry?

For one maintaining a lot of apps and connectors costs time and focus at marginal return. Also it burns relationships with everyone building on top of your API if they could be disrupted anytime.

If their valuation is justified, they WILL disrupt every SaaS worth disrupting where most of the value is in the first S. There isn't enough money in selling a commodity.

Watch them abandon these projects after 6 months.

They'll just ignore any user complaints about them being broken or expensive. Anthropic support is bad.

I don't think they have a proven history of abandoning projects yet. Why would they when the tools they build (agents) can dramatically reduce the costs of maintaining and improving projects?

They don't have a history. Period.

And I'd argue they sort of abandoned MCP. Claude's support for it is poor.

> When you’re done brainstorming, Claude can turn the board into a doc or deck, or bring it into tools like Lucid, Miro, or Vani by Zoho, where you can continue working on it with your team.

either fully commit to disrupting your customers and keep a walled garden or stop building in the space, this incremental approach will only ship confusion

> When you’re done brainstorming ... where you can continue working on it with your team.

Yeah, if we're done working on it, why are we continuing to work on it? That makes no sense.

Model companies are starting to cannibalize their api customers's business cases. Shows that the regular avenues of revenue growth are slowing down

Vertical integration was always in the cards, unfortunately.

Whiteboarding is the main thing I do in my AI build processes outside of Claude - if they can do it native + multiplayer, it's going to be a huge UX improvement for a lot of users.

> Shows that the regular avenues of revenue growth are slowing down

Why does it show that? Maybe they have tens of billions of dollars and the bandwidth to do more.

The revenue growth dropped from 100+% QoQ to only 60% QoQ, they're dying! /s

Which will cause customers to leave. Good thing I just bought a fresh batch of popcorn from Costco.

Unless Microsoft and Google get their butts into gear, Claude is going to become the basis for running a business and disrupt Office and Workspace.

Are they? Still seems way more convenient to just connect Claude to whatever people are already running.

Nobody is replacing excel anywhere.

This isn’t true. Today we needed to build a model for our startup to forecast headcount. Usually I’d use excel. Instead Claude built an app for me. More powerful features in a fraction of the time.

You're a single person in a startup.

For good or bad, big companies run on Excel.

At my last job - a large tech company - if it wasn't in Excel, then engineers and HR wouldn't use it. The team had a tool that collected data from various databases for the end user and did some analytics. The code was in Python. The output was an Excel file.

I asked why they didn't use pandas.

"Because the users are just going to take the output and put it in Excel."

It was a very successful tool. No one needed to use it so we had to ensure users liked it. All due to the team lead's wisdom on how big companies operate.

They also wanted us to autogenerated PowerPoint files. We gave up on that. The spec is a mess.

They run on excel today. They will run on code in the future. Excel was a way for normies to write code with all the limitations that came with it. Now normies can just write the code.

I used to work as a trader for a major investment bank. Everything was excel. I can’t see it staying that way.

[delayed]

Nadella already said that they expect to have more revenue from agents than from humans.

They are shifting to building stuff for agents, not for humans.

Ironically, Claude is building stuff for humans :)

You mean like slack did?

Yep, just need Claude Mail (Cmail, anyone?) and Cluade Docs and you have a strong competitor to Google Workspaces. I'd consider using Cmail to start getting out of googles ad ecosystem.

and… into anthropic’s instead??

I did my first claude slides presentation. I don't see myself voluntarily loading up PowerPoint again.

Now it'll be harder to do the same for word and harder still for excel, but word is doable, and claude can build one off tools better than excel can, so I definitely think that MS should be wary.

Honestly, Excel seems easier to me, with the caveat that Excel serves two purposes.

The "I need some place to organize tabular data" use case is so different that I'm not considering it for the rest of this.

But for actual computation, if you throw it in Claude, it'll figure it out. It's much easier to do than to use Excel. Claude itself isn't limited to Excel; it can use pandas and the much, much improved plotting tools compared to Excel. I'm an OpenAI guy myself and used codecs to have it make me ggplot2 graphs, but then I forgot to specify it and it just used straight-up Python — I think it actually generated them as SVG files. As sad as I was about it, they looked better than the ones I had it make using ggplot2.

Regular Excel doesn't even compare there; not only can ggplot2 make many additional types of graphs, but SVG plotting, Python, and pandas can make literally any chart you want, including things like polar-coordinate charts.

Claude vendor lock-in - Claude: not thanks! I prefer you as an easily interchangeable commodity that plays an intermittent role in my broader AI strategy.

Good to see them go after the big players

Let's get Claude office, Claude auth, Claude notebooks.... maybe call it C Suite.

Spreadsheets are becoming standard UX elements like text boxes...

When Anthropic released "claude design" people were telling that figma is dead now, but in fact claude design didn't move forward and stayed as a "fallback tool" when you quickly need to check / edit something. And for the serious work you still go to Figma and other designer tools. I have a feeling that Whiteboards, Sheets, Docs and so on will be the same - it's a nicer way to present artefacts, discuss them and maybe make notes, but for the proper editor experience you'll go to the tools which were designed for these things. And I'm not saying that Claude Something tools are bad, they're just overly simplified and limited, probably on purpose.

I'm really happy with what Claude can do with Reladraw. No longer are objects colliding on the drawing (SVG or others). The artifacts that Claude can create off of "lighter" tools will make me go there 80% of the time, Figma and other "heavies" can stay in the 20%. More like 90/10 actually.

> objects colliding on the drawing

I don't quite follow you. Are you talking about Mermaid's lack of decision when laying out diagrams?

I'm working on a tool that makes it easier for me to work with mermaid diagrams (mermaid is a great intermediary format for representing certain types of information, e.g. software architecure, but its syntax does not work well with my brain), so I'm interested in alternative concepts that make it easier to work with these types of things.

Mermaid is an automatic layout tool. Reladraw has language where instead of letting an algorithm completely randomize your layout, you declare where items go using relative terms, such as below, right of, level with, or gaps (relative placement). The natural language is good for the LLM.

True, but still waiting for Figma stock recovery :(

I thought Figma would recover once they finally do something with Payload CMS since they acquired them long time ago. And only now I found that they did (https://www.figma.com/blog/websites-with-payload-in-figma/) and it doesn't look good :/ I was expecting much more

Claude design was good and it only gets better at design. For solo projects, it’s much better. They’re moving it from standalone to being fully integrated.

Figma is the default for teams but is losing a lot of stickiness.

I agree on solo projects, I actually use claude design as a viewer to see what my agents built or for quick and dirty prototypes, the design work itself happens in claude code. So to me "claude design" as a product doesn't really click, although I agree it's useful for many many people. In my case I'm just not an experience designer to learn Figma from scratch so claude design covers that part, but I saw how cool UX designers were still choosing Figma

You're right but I do feel like this is more of a case of different paradigms being a slow burn rather than a failure.

I don't see people switching to Claude sheets overnight & the messaging from anthropic will likely become less effusive over time (short-/medium-term). But I'd be surprised if this doesn't make significant inroads in the long-term.

I agree, these new products (the same as claude design) is a base on which they'll be probably building new experiences and use cases, so long-term it will get much more integrated into daily live, especially for quick and easy tasks

> When Anthropic released "claude design" people were telling that figma is dead now, but in fact claude design didn't move forward and stayed as a "fallback tool" when you quickly need to check / edit something.

I don't think there is a reasonable expectation that these new tools will simply end Google Workspace. Google are going to be just fine to do whatever they want with their stuff, and they have the customers.

Anthropic can just do this for a new generation of people and businesses, and establish themselves here over time.

Figma is trading lower now than it did when Claude Design was released with a total stock drop of 56.38% from Nov 10, 2025 to Nov 10, 2026.

So yes, not dead and clearly good for people who want that additional layer of control, but also nowhere where it used to be.

I think its shortsighted tbh. The advances are crazy. One will just release another claude design later and before you know it, it'll just be super figma.

What these tools are generally missing is a way for the user to "fix stuff" that isnt just prompting. Once they add things like that, added to model improvements... it's just going to be a cost story: which one is cheaper.

I wouldn't take any "X is dead" as more than just momentarily hype, we should get used to it now that it's been happening for years.

For me, this is simply a first-party UI for Claude. So they have better control over the presentation layer + some extra features on top.

It's not meant to be equivalent to Google Sheets or Excel.

Once you understand how far you can push it, Claude Design is an incredible tool - my personal favorite ai-related thing of the year. Of course it's piggybacking off all the model advancements which has made it increasingly capable.

Claude365

ClaudeCloudServices

ClaudeERP

ClaudeCRM

ClaudeNeuralLink

ClaudeConsciousnessUpload

I don’t understand the need for these side quests. Microsoft has a 40 year lead in spreadsheets. You are not going to dethrone them no matter how good your AI’s code is. And no one is asking you for an excel competitor. Fixing the million problems in existing products that users have already raised (aka the boring work) is a much better use of resources.

Tell that to google sheets or google docs?? At some point you want to easily interoperate with a document or spreadsheet artifact. There aren't great drop in solutions while keeping everything within managed context. Compiling to and from docx or xls files don't make sense. It makes the most sense to spin up your own. What do you expect them to do instead?

I've seen large enterprise customers who adopt GSuite but still have a few thousand Excel licenses because the people who need certain Excel features, just need them. Average user might find Claude Sheets is enough, but it won't replace Excel everywhere anytime soon.

I've not really seen anyone using sheets for serious number crunching tbh. It does cover 90% of use cases though.

I don't see them as side quests but rather as a complement to what they offer.

A typical workflow is: connect via MCP to some data source. Do some stats, transformations, etc. Put the data in a format that Claude understands or will understand better later. Make a UI/story out of it. Keep track of your "things" through visualizations.

Been using this worlflow extensively now. This is their easy wall garden.

> You are not going to dethrone them no matter how good your AI’s code is.

They absolutely are. Maybe not quickly (let's face it, Excel users are not sprightly), but this is absolutely going to displace Gsuite, and any Excel users who were thinking of moving to it.

I expect Google will respond.

40 year lead in bloat and legacy cruft maybe

It's a desperation move. They're listing because they're out of runway, they're trying to extend the runway.

They are building a walled garden platform the same way Apple and Microsoft does. This isn't at all a surprising move.

CLAUDE(/openAI) Everything soon - at least before the IPO.

So LLM provider want to become all-encompasing app/data suite providers. But really this would just shift your data/money from one paid walled garden (Google/Micro$/Adope) into another: so only a lateral move.

The better solution would be a uniform 'App Suite of the commons' (open-source) with a plugable/switchable data and inference providers.

"better" as in better for the customer, not better for Anthropic :)

Reality is, the crazy valuation given to frontier labs will push them to capture more of the value chain, to make it harder for customers to switch models. Having a best-in-class model is not defensible, long term.

RIP Gsuite.

Claude data is a huge move, much bigger than the other two (even if they end up with more users).

All Anthropic needs is to host an S3 clone and they become the default place to put all your company's data because they are the easiest place to analyze the data.

And what company is going to hand over all their data to Anthropic without proper controls, regulatory compliance, sovereignty rules and customer managed encryption and isolation? Could it happen, yes. Will it happen quickly, no.

Claude Code is already being used by tons of large companies. I'm sure they will figure out how to do it pretty quickly.

Lol, not it's not.

No company that need that level of data ingest and analysis is using Anthropic's tooling over something that is used industry wide.

> Working with Claude on a project often meant moving the output over to another tool or program, where Claude didn’t have live access to follow progress and changes. Now, your documents, boards, sheets, and dashboards can stay in Claude, with access for your team to continue editing together.

I read this as: We'll build anything and everything into Claude eventually.

How does this work long-term? Is the new reality going to be picking an AI provider for all of your SaSS tooling, similar to Cloud providers for infra? Hopefully competition thrives.

Claude becomes a no-code

Competition will thrive as it always does, wouldn’t worry about that. In this case I view Claude as more of the competitor here. Ever try using Co-pilot in Microsoft Office?

“Please remove this page break I can’t figure out how to get rid of and someone else added”

Co-pilot: “Sorry I’m unable to do that but you can follows these same instructions you can find on the Internet to accomplish that”.

Claude: “I will literally rebuild Word from the ground up to solve this problem if that’s what it takes (but here is how to actually solve your problem), oh and do you want this exported in the best format for this software, this other software, or in these 15 file formats? Oh I don’t have native capabilities for that format - ok let’s build a script and convert….”

You get the picture. Competition is here, and it will get even better. Many SaaS companies will die. Good. Many of them only delivered short-term value solving artificial constrains or gaps in software.

The playbook Anthropic is following with integrating everything innto their platform is the same playbook that enabled Microsoft, Google, Baidu, Amazon, Apple, etc al to get and stay where they are.

I mean, I don't think it's that different from the current reality of businesses just picking Microsoft or Google as their one-stop-shop for business software. There will actually be more competition now, as Anthropic and OpenAI will be added to the mix.

>How does this work long-term? Is the new reality going to be picking an AI provider for all of your SaSS tooling,

I suspect the goal is partly starting a walled garden.

"Llms are interchangeable? Our harness/toolset isn't".

It's a way to get a moat I guess.

It doesn't sound like a business for the scale they're aiming for though. Taking a bite of the MS office's pie doesn't seem to me like a trillion dollar company move.

That's the goal. They're desperately trying to make their platform 'sticky'. I see OpenAI using similar tactics with Spaces and Dots.

Dots in particular display some insidious methodology, they've hidden the "programmable" portions of an agent. They want to make it 'magic' (all your work goes through a single tool) but... that's pretty much exactly what businesses DON'T want. We need to see what it's doing, accessing, working with, underlying data, etc... It's an explicit business requirement for us.

The more they can 'hide' what the backend does, the harder it is to get away from the product.

Buuuuut, I don't think it's going to work. I can still export it somehow if I want to, and it would probably take 10-15 minutes... The whole point of these agents is that they're 'plug and play' with whatever technology you want.

And if they don't build them this way, someone will whip up an open source version that does it cheaper and more transparently in a couple of weeks.

Software being free now hits both of these companies exactly where they want protection.

[delayed]

ugh, another thing that no one is going to use.

Their competition is offering good enough models for vastly better prices and they are making products that their customers don't need.

I feel like there will be a site similar to google graveyard for all these AI+X products that OAI and ANT are throwing out.

The one thing I do really like about Claude / Anthropic is that Claude.ai docs (especially its ability to create HTML docs) seems substantially better than Gemini or ChatGPT.

These seem like natural extensions that I'm sure will be very useful.

Did somebody say vendor lock-in?

There's a reason my co still has Slack and it ain't because of its simple and bug-free app. It's because every written conversation we've ever had is in there.

Man, I really hope that Google doesn't see this and decide to start scraping their suite to train Gemini. As it stands, anything not explicitly marked as public isn't scraped so there's that modicum of peace but I'll have to start exclusively using Euro-Office/LibreOffice if this gets more traction and Google decides to make the switch.

The need a reporting and analytics offering (if they don't have one already). If i can tell it "ok report over this data, join it together, bucket by this field" then review and say "no wait, filter by this field and only show me addresses in Ohio... oh wait let the viewer choose a state. ok add the appropriate graph to show change over time" then "finally publish and notify users it's available". That would make a part of my job a lot easier.

Apple created IWork: Pages, Numbers, Keynote. Google created Workspaces with Docs, Sheets, Slides. Open source options like LibreOffice and OpenOffice exist. Google is the only one that has managed to take any significant market share from Microsoft. I don't think Anthropic has the focus to follow it through.

Nice to see this is also on Teams and Enterprise, naturally.