5 ms·

It’s bundled with office, so for enterprise customers (where the $$$ is), Lists is free whereas AirTable is not. Even with any pricing adjustments, I find it ve

by nxc18 6y ago

It’s bundled with office, so for enterprise customers (where the $$$ is), Lists is free whereas AirTable is not. Even with any pricing adjustments, I find it very unlikely office customers would save going with AirTable. Maybe they have a market in GSuite customers? Just like with Teams and Slack, the office product just has to be good enough, and it will succeed. Microsoft doesn’t need to make money off it, just protect their office subscriptions. Slack and AirTable need to make money.

flanbiscuit 6y ago
Yeah I know someone who is working on rolling out AirTable to many departments in their company over the last few months. This big enterprise corp uses MS Office 365 already (like many big corps). And with so many companies looking to cut corners, with a free product available incorporated into a suite of apps they already pay for why continue to pay for AirTable? This might make AirTable loose a pretty large customer even if the actual end users in the company prefers AirTable.
- rhizome 6y ago
  How much is AirTable support? How much is Lists/365's?
  - tosers4 6y ago
    But most bigcorps already pay for 365 support. And if they were using airtable or considering, Lists starts to look better. This is an addiction to a current MS product.
joe5150 6y ago
Also important in my field (education) is compliance with records management laws, which means that we do as much as possible with just MS tools in order to avoid needing to export and manage data from so many different sources. We are currently moving projects from Trello to MS Teams + Planner for this reason even though the workflow will likely be worse.
- catmanjan 6y ago
  Is teams records management compliant? I know it isn't in my country
  - joe5150 6y ago
    It depends on what you do with it, but in my estimation, not really (and it's actually easier to export data from Trello assuming you pay for Business Class). But our IT and records people seem to believe that having everything under the same vendor umbrella is an improvement over having data scattered between services, even if some of the components don't actually offer full compliance.
    - toyg 6y ago
      From a bureaucratic perspective, what auditing feedback looks better: A: "You're not compliant, what the hell were you thinking using this 'Trello' thingie ?!?" B: "You're not compliant but it's fine, everyone uses Microsoft like you do so it's probably not possible to be fully OK, we are all in the same boat..." Feedback B can easily go up the chain with no repercussions. Feedback A cannot. It's a sad world.
abtinf 6y ago
For many organizations, the fact that it is free is less important than the fact that they already have Office. If a team in a mid-to-large company wants to use Airtable, they will have to spend a lot of time championing the process--audits, vetting, bidding, legal, data management, and on and on and on. If they subscribe to Office365, they've already gone through this process. It will either be enabled by default, or be subject to a much less stringent review before IT flips the switch. Put another way: money (at least the sums involved for most SaaS) is the least important objection a customer might have to adoption. Side note: this is also part of the reason why Excel is so popular, even though many executives are aware of its short-commings and might wish for something more integrated. Even if they have the budget, it is excruciating trying to onboard a SaaS offering.
- stevedh 6y ago
  Absolutely agree with everything here. But I'm curious what you're considering as an Excel replacement? For anything more sophisticated than Google Sheet's can handle I can't think of a single alternative off-hand.
  - abtinf 6y ago
    Apologies, that part of my post was unclear. I didn’t mean replacements for Excel itself. I meant specific vertical applications that are meant to replace common excel use cases. I’ve been part of efforts to evaluate tools like Wrike and Aha! as replacements for gnarly excel spreadsheets. A single meeting of the stakeholders (managers of affected teams, VPs, high level engineers) to consider some aspect of the purchase decision cost more in salary and opportunity cost than a year of the SaaS subscription. Actual adoption, implementation, and training turned the cost of the product into a rounding error.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

by nxc18 6y ago

flanbiscuit 6y ago

Yeah I know someone who is working on rolling out AirTable to many departments in their company over the last few months. This big enterprise corp uses MS Office 365 already (like many big corps). And with so many companies looking to cut corners, with a free product available incorporated into a suite of apps they already pay for why continue to pay for AirTable? This might make AirTable loose a pretty large customer even if the actual end users in the company prefers AirTable.

rhizome 6y ago
How much is AirTable support? How much is Lists/365's?
- tosers4 6y ago
  But most bigcorps already pay for 365 support. And if they were using airtable or considering, Lists starts to look better. This is an addiction to a current MS product.

joe5150 6y ago

Also important in my field (education) is compliance with records management laws, which means that we do as much as possible with just MS tools in order to avoid needing to export and manage data from so many different sources. We are currently moving projects from Trello to MS Teams + Planner for this reason even though the workflow will likely be worse.

catmanjan 6y ago
Is teams records management compliant? I know it isn't in my country
- joe5150 6y ago
  It depends on what you do with it, but in my estimation, not really (and it's actually easier to export data from Trello assuming you pay for Business Class). But our IT and records people seem to believe that having everything under the same vendor umbrella is an improvement over having data scattered between services, even if some of the components don't actually offer full compliance.
  - toyg 6y ago
    From a bureaucratic perspective, what auditing feedback looks better: A: "You're not compliant, what the hell were you thinking using this 'Trello' thingie ?!?" B: "You're not compliant but it's fine, everyone uses Microsoft like you do so it's probably not possible to be fully OK, we are all in the same boat..." Feedback B can easily go up the chain with no repercussions. Feedback A cannot. It's a sad world.

abtinf 6y ago

For many organizations, the fact that it is free is less important than the fact that they already have Office. If a team in a mid-to-large company wants to use Airtable, they will have to spend a lot of time championing the process--audits, vetting, bidding, legal, data management, and on and on and on. If they subscribe to Office365, they've already gone through this process. It will either be enabled by default, or be subject to a much less stringent review before IT flips the switch. Put another way: money (at least the sums involved for most SaaS) is the least important objection a customer might have to adoption. Side note: this is also part of the reason why Excel is so popular, even though many executives are aware of its short-commings and might wish for something more integrated. Even if they have the budget, it is excruciating trying to onboard a SaaS offering.

stevedh 6y ago
Absolutely agree with everything here. But I'm curious what you're considering as an Excel replacement? For anything more sophisticated than Google Sheet's can handle I can't think of a single alternative off-hand.
- abtinf 6y ago
  Apologies, that part of my post was unclear. I didn’t mean replacements for Excel itself. I meant specific vertical applications that are meant to replace common excel use cases. I’ve been part of efforts to evaluate tools like Wrike and Aha! as replacements for gnarly excel spreadsheets. A single meeting of the stakeholders (managers of affected teams, VPs, high level engineers) to consider some aspect of the purchase decision cost more in salary and opportunity cost than a year of the SaaS subscription. Actual adoption, implementation, and training turned the cost of the product into a rounding error.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]