9 ms·

When Airtable came out, I remember hearing a lot of comparisons to MSFT Access (enabling non-technical users to set up DB-driven apps). Funny to see it come ful

by pge 6y ago

When Airtable came out, I remember hearing a lot of comparisons to MSFT Access (enabling non-technical users to set up DB-driven apps). Funny to see it come full circle and have MSFT now introduce a competitor. Maybe they should have invested in keeping Access current instead of leaving it stuck in the 90s?

whoisjuan 6y ago
They went full carbon-copy with this product, so it seems that they acknowledge that the UX in this space is key. How do you upgrade the UX of a legacy product like Access without pissing off everyone? You can't. Old habits die hard. Modernizing or changing any fundamental UX in Access is probably a very unpopular choice within their current userbase and likely more expensive than starting from scratch. It's simpler to go and copy Airtable which is already proven to be a successful model/UX and let that product cannibalize the market of your legacy products.
- coffeemug 6y ago
  > How do you upgrade the UX of a legacy product like Access without pissing off everyone? Incrementally.
  - kevingadd 6y ago
    The way people reacted to the Ribbon disagrees with you :) Toolbars specifically were replaced with an improved chunk of UI, everything else was left the same, and people were furious. Rightly so, to a degree - learning to use it was an adjustment. Now imagine that the whole app's UI incrementally changed and not just parts of it... nobody's gonna be happy about that.
    - eitland 6y ago
      > Toolbars specifically were replaced with an improved chunk of UI, everything else was left the same Was hiding the file menu items behind a round logo that looked nothing like a button part of that improved UI? Is the current file menu that looks like the rest of the menus but behaves totally different part of the improved UI?
      - kevingadd 6y ago
        The Menus were a toolbar before the ribbon existed, which is why you could customize them. Visual Studio was the same. So it was natural for the ribbon to eat up the menus as well. Certainly that's part of why people disliked it, but the artificial separation between 'menu' and 'toolbar' was already kind of a problem and that's why they were unified.
        ethbro 6y ago
        People disliked Ribbon because it took a logical system geared towards power users (hierarchical menus) and replaced it with an organic system geared towards new users (usage-driven ordering). There was no way that wasn't going to piss off a very vocal segment of users, and Microsoft, to their detriment, badly botched the messaging.
        eitland 6y ago
        My point is that even if Ribbon was a good idea the implementation had a number of flaws that made me question of UX really was the reason and not something else. My go-to example is how the File menu was hidden behind a non-button that looked just like a fancy application logo. Why would an actual, caring ux developer do that in a flagship product?
    - meddlepal 6y ago
      Am I the only damn person that liked the ribbon's?!
      - wyattpeak 6y ago
        I don't think it's a question of what people ultimately like. It's that change is frustrating, especially for only marginal benefit. I like the ribbon today, and I complained when it was released. And I stand by that complaint, I think pushback against change serves an important role, and developers should feel pain when making UX changes. It's not just a matter of some changes being bad, even when they're good there's a cost. My grandparents both had iPhones, loved them and loved learning to do different things on them. Whenever I'd visit they'd have a laundry list of things they wanted to learn to do. Over time, that list was slowly supplanted by relearning how to do things they once knew, but had changed. It was extremely frustrating because so much of it was near-pointless. Easy for me (and most of their test-base, I'm sure) to relearn, but very difficult for nonagenarians.
  - whoisjuan 6y ago
    Windows incrementally removed the "Start" button and had to roll back. This is simply an issue of creating generational products that adapt to the new ways your demographics are using technology. You can incrementally change a product but you will never be able to use new interaction patterns in a product that is used by people who don't know them and don't want to learn them. Generation Z and Generation Alpha kids are not going to use Access. They will be using this or whatever succeeds this. That's for sure. This is the same reason why Apple is going full steam into making the iPad its core productivity and creativity device. Newer generations have way better dexterity when using touch as an input, than let's say my generation (millennials). They know Macbooks are products with a UX expiration date.
    - enraged_camel 6y ago
      >> Windows incrementally removed the "Start" button and had to roll back. I mean, flat out removing something, by definition, is not incremental.
      - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
        I don't remember how it happened as I had moved off of Windows in that period, maybe they made it slowly opaque over a couple releases.
      - sooheon 6y ago
        If you can’t remove elements, you can’t refine design incrementally.
      - artificial 6y ago
        They should've shrunk the button down each release. For any features I plan to remove I'll gradually make them smaller.
      - internet2000 6y ago
        The corner still worked as a start menu, and they told you that on first run. It was as incremental as possible.
  - groby_b 6y ago
    That's the one thing you really don't want to do. I know, product and UX teams everywhere believe it's a good plan, but I suggest talking to users. There are few things that generate stronger emotions than "They moved my FUCKING menu item AGAIN"
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - jiggawatts 6y ago
    They were actually doing that. Microsoft Access inherited many of the productivity features of Excel, such as filters in the column headers. It was great. Where they dropped the ball was the core engine and capabilities. What people wanted was quick & easy way to produce HTML5 forms and tables, but with the power of a native GUI app. Meanwhile, Microsoft was removing features from Access, such as the SQL Server based "Access Data Projects" (ADP) mode, which was much more scalable than the legacy Jet database mode.
    - indymike 6y ago
      Actually, filters in the column headers came from a database, Paradox that predated GUI apps and was a major player in the PC database market.
    - ethbro 6y ago
      > What people wanted was quick & easy way to produce HTML5 forms and tables, but with the power of a native GUI app. Spot on. As with all things, Microsoft-of-the-time saw the web as a competitor to its products, not a new platform. They actually could have built substantial portions of Office 365 (which is to say, cloud -first and -integrated Office) in the early 2000s, but tried to protect their legacy businesses. It's nice to see them finally getting there, but Access-to-Web would still be a killer product for much of Enterprise, if they could solve the data source connectivity issues in a clean way for users.
- j45 6y ago
  You could make a new platform to help people slowly migrate to. It's been done with other products. Check out Articulate Storyline / Rise.
- thomasrognon 6y ago
  I think there's so much truth to UX being king, especially for tight-knit forward-thinking teams. However, these products always seem to ignore heavy use cases common in large orgs. Like lots of records and nuanced permissions that really fit business rules. I started from that direction with https://www.cloudternal.com https://www.cloudternal.com (and will have a great UX eventually too!).
  - samanator 6y ago
    Looks great! I just singed up for early access. I'm currently helping a company choose a CRM. We went with Salesforce but I'd love to find a cheaper alternative. However it doesn't seem you can create automation within your product. Unless I'm mistaken?
    - tixocloud 6y ago
      Curious - what made you go with Salesforce?
      - samanator 6y ago
        Mainly it's what I'm familiar with. But I did try and use other CRM's (including SuiteCRM, Airtable and a few others) and didn't find the important combination of: 1) Modern UI's I didn't need to write myself 2) Automation with and transactional atomic write guarantees 3) An extensible and scalable sharing model Although I didn't try dynamics. I'm guessing it's a suitable alternative.
    - thomasrognon 6y ago
      We don't currently have automation, but we plan on having it ready either Q3 or Q4 this year (we might do mobile first, it depends on demand). Thanks for signing up, we'll reach out to you soon!
- neves 6y ago
  Aren't both of them copies of Trello. They even copy Joel's description of the application as a list of lists: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-different/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-diff...
  - cdmoyer 6y ago
    I don't think they're in the same space. Trello is a list of todo lists. Whereas Airtable and lists are for data you'd put in a spreadsheet or database.
    - monadic2 6y ago
      Trello is moving into this space with some of their automation plugins.
- coronadisaster 6y ago
  Can't they separate UX from the rest? and have 2 UX for the same product?
  - awad 6y ago
    I would say that often leads to poor UX
  - cjsawyer 6y ago
    Windows 8 is a good example of why that might not work.
- travbrack 6y ago
  You can add views and leave the old ones in place
- ddrt 6y ago
  Wait, you’re talking about the same company that had clippy, and moves around their ribbon as if the plot is none of our business?
- tikiman163 6y ago
  Microsoft has been doing a lot of this lately. Skype needed a massive overhaul to keep up so they made a Slack clone (Teams) that will slowly take over as people decide to switch. AWS and Atlassian products are polular? They create Azure and Azure Devops, which replaces Team Foundations and Visual Studios Online. Admittedly, in that last one they actually just upgraded Visual Studio Online to turn it into Azure Devops and added new features.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > How do you upgrade the UX of a legacy product like Access without pissing off everyone? Make a new opt-in UX supporting the same backend features (meaning that you need new features to support both) and maintain both. But it's expensive, so eventually you hope to merge them or kill one, which is where the risk of people getting pissed off arises again. GMail/Inbox, for example.
ijidak 6y ago
Microsoft's modus operandi is copy, defeat, repeat. It's a very profitable strategy, though perhaps less charismatic. Other companies do this too, but I've seen few tech companies as good at copy, defeat, repeat as Microsoft. In this same vein, they rarely try to take an old product and radically update it (at least not with success). Partially because it's harder to make an exact copy of a new software concept with an existing technology. They prefer to abandon existing products. (Unless the computing industry at large still gives the space mindshare, or the profits are too delicious to let go of.) As I think about it.... It's sort of like Fortune 500 level FOMO... Disclosure: I used to work at Microsoft. Love the company. But get irritated that their strategy often seems capricious -- chasing the latest industry squirrel.
- viraptor 6y ago
  > few tech companies as good at copy, defeat, repeat as Microsoft. It was called Embrace, Extend, Extinguish internally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
  - robomc 6y ago
    Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is something different. It's about adopting standards in order to break them and gradually lock people into proprietary variants. This guy is talking about just copying existing products.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
specialist 6y ago
Access is my favorite Microsoft product. A web-based Access has always been a great idea. Alas. I'm still angry Microsoft reneged on the promised migration path from workgroup to client/server. Like the people burned by Google's abandonment of beloved product & projects, I will never again trust Microsoft enough to actually use their stuff voluntarily. I'm fresh out of goodwill. (Much as I like SQL/Server, my projects have always had a Plan B.)
balakk 6y ago
FWIW, Sharepoint (online) has had a Lists feature for decades now, and is as prevalent in Enterprises as Access was, if not more. It just so happens to be that Teams is the flavor of the future. So more stuff from SharePoint comes into Teams. Not everything is a conspiracy. Disclaimer: work there, but my views..
- larrywright 6y ago
  The video introduction I watched said that it was built on top of the SharePoint lists feature.
- theschmed 6y ago
  Hopefully the UX is better than the abysmal current UX for these lists.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
They couldn't keep Access current, or, NOT stuck in the 90's because people would expect their 90's Access files to still work in the new version. It's a weird one because on the one side, backwards compatibility is / has been keeping Microsoft behind for years. On the other, it's why so many companies trust them.
kqvamxurcagg 6y ago
Access still a fantastic product that in no way compares to Airtable and other todo list toys on the market.
nojito 6y ago
The best startup ideas are simply taking a piece of the massive office ecosystem and marketing it better than Microsoft. Joel jokes about it here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
- tosers4 6y ago
  yes, and they they are acquired by microsoft (or other giant) or microsoft simply makes a clone, just like what's happening here, or with teams, or todos or any other recent MS app. MSFT is just too big. Trillion dollar companies are a sin on this earth
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Maybe they should have invested in keeping Access current instead of leaving it stuck in the 90s? Or maybe they were right to protect the enterprises with big legacy investments and will have relatively little trouble leveraging their entrenched position and vast resources to make a good-enough player in the new market once someone else has proven it to win by greater integration with Microsoft’s existing services. I mean, that's been a fairly consistent (though not 100% so) recipe for success for Microsoft for quite a while.
kjaftaedi 6y ago
I love Microsoft Access and think it's a great tool, but am struggling to think of any good business use cases that aren't covered better by Microsoft PowerBI

by pge 6y ago

whoisjuan 6y ago

They went full carbon-copy with this product, so it seems that they acknowledge that the UX in this space is key. How do you upgrade the UX of a legacy product like Access without pissing off everyone? You can't. Old habits die hard. Modernizing or changing any fundamental UX in Access is probably a very unpopular choice within their current userbase and likely more expensive than starting from scratch. It's simpler to go and copy Airtable which is already proven to be a successful model/UX and let that product cannibalize the market of your legacy products.

coffeemug 6y ago
> How do you upgrade the UX of a legacy product like Access without pissing off everyone? Incrementally.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  The way people reacted to the Ribbon disagrees with you :) Toolbars specifically were replaced with an improved chunk of UI, everything else was left the same, and people were furious. Rightly so, to a degree - learning to use it was an adjustment. Now imagine that the whole app's UI incrementally changed and not just parts of it... nobody's gonna be happy about that.
  - eitland 6y ago
    > Toolbars specifically were replaced with an improved chunk of UI, everything else was left the same Was hiding the file menu items behind a round logo that looked nothing like a button part of that improved UI? Is the current file menu that looks like the rest of the menus but behaves totally different part of the improved UI?
    - kevingadd 6y ago
      The Menus were a toolbar before the ribbon existed, which is why you could customize them. Visual Studio was the same. So it was natural for the ribbon to eat up the menus as well. Certainly that's part of why people disliked it, but the artificial separation between 'menu' and 'toolbar' was already kind of a problem and that's why they were unified.
      - ethbro 6y ago
        People disliked Ribbon because it took a logical system geared towards power users (hierarchical menus) and replaced it with an organic system geared towards new users (usage-driven ordering). There was no way that wasn't going to piss off a very vocal segment of users, and Microsoft, to their detriment, badly botched the messaging.
        eitland 6y ago
        My point is that even if Ribbon was a good idea the implementation had a number of flaws that made me question of UX really was the reason and not something else. My go-to example is how the File menu was hidden behind a non-button that looked just like a fancy application logo. Why would an actual, caring ux developer do that in a flagship product?
  - meddlepal 6y ago
    Am I the only damn person that liked the ribbon's?!
    - wyattpeak 6y ago
      I don't think it's a question of what people ultimately like. It's that change is frustrating, especially for only marginal benefit. I like the ribbon today, and I complained when it was released. And I stand by that complaint, I think pushback against change serves an important role, and developers should feel pain when making UX changes. It's not just a matter of some changes being bad, even when they're good there's a cost. My grandparents both had iPhones, loved them and loved learning to do different things on them. Whenever I'd visit they'd have a laundry list of things they wanted to learn to do. Over time, that list was slowly supplanted by relearning how to do things they once knew, but had changed. It was extremely frustrating because so much of it was near-pointless. Easy for me (and most of their test-base, I'm sure) to relearn, but very difficult for nonagenarians.
- whoisjuan 6y ago
  Windows incrementally removed the "Start" button and had to roll back. This is simply an issue of creating generational products that adapt to the new ways your demographics are using technology. You can incrementally change a product but you will never be able to use new interaction patterns in a product that is used by people who don't know them and don't want to learn them. Generation Z and Generation Alpha kids are not going to use Access. They will be using this or whatever succeeds this. That's for sure. This is the same reason why Apple is going full steam into making the iPad its core productivity and creativity device. Newer generations have way better dexterity when using touch as an input, than let's say my generation (millennials). They know Macbooks are products with a UX expiration date.
  - enraged_camel 6y ago
    >> Windows incrementally removed the "Start" button and had to roll back. I mean, flat out removing something, by definition, is not incremental.
    - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      I don't remember how it happened as I had moved off of Windows in that period, maybe they made it slowly opaque over a couple releases.
    - sooheon 6y ago
      If you can’t remove elements, you can’t refine design incrementally.
    - artificial 6y ago
      They should've shrunk the button down each release. For any features I plan to remove I'll gradually make them smaller.
    - internet2000 6y ago
      The corner still worked as a start menu, and they told you that on first run. It was as incremental as possible.
- groby_b 6y ago
  That's the one thing you really don't want to do. I know, product and UX teams everywhere believe it's a good plan, but I suggest talking to users. There are few things that generate stronger emotions than "They moved my FUCKING menu item AGAIN"
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- jiggawatts 6y ago
  They were actually doing that. Microsoft Access inherited many of the productivity features of Excel, such as filters in the column headers. It was great. Where they dropped the ball was the core engine and capabilities. What people wanted was quick & easy way to produce HTML5 forms and tables, but with the power of a native GUI app. Meanwhile, Microsoft was removing features from Access, such as the SQL Server based "Access Data Projects" (ADP) mode, which was much more scalable than the legacy Jet database mode.
  - indymike 6y ago
    Actually, filters in the column headers came from a database, Paradox that predated GUI apps and was a major player in the PC database market.
  - ethbro 6y ago
    > What people wanted was quick & easy way to produce HTML5 forms and tables, but with the power of a native GUI app. Spot on. As with all things, Microsoft-of-the-time saw the web as a competitor to its products, not a new platform. They actually could have built substantial portions of Office 365 (which is to say, cloud -first and -integrated Office) in the early 2000s, but tried to protect their legacy businesses. It's nice to see them finally getting there, but Access-to-Web would still be a killer product for much of Enterprise, if they could solve the data source connectivity issues in a clean way for users.
j45 6y ago
You could make a new platform to help people slowly migrate to. It's been done with other products. Check out Articulate Storyline / Rise.
thomasrognon 6y ago
I think there's so much truth to UX being king, especially for tight-knit forward-thinking teams. However, these products always seem to ignore heavy use cases common in large orgs. Like lots of records and nuanced permissions that really fit business rules. I started from that direction with https://www.cloudternal.com https://www.cloudternal.com (and will have a great UX eventually too!).
- samanator 6y ago
  Looks great! I just singed up for early access. I'm currently helping a company choose a CRM. We went with Salesforce but I'd love to find a cheaper alternative. However it doesn't seem you can create automation within your product. Unless I'm mistaken?
  - tixocloud 6y ago
    Curious - what made you go with Salesforce?
    - samanator 6y ago
      Mainly it's what I'm familiar with. But I did try and use other CRM's (including SuiteCRM, Airtable and a few others) and didn't find the important combination of: 1) Modern UI's I didn't need to write myself 2) Automation with and transactional atomic write guarantees 3) An extensible and scalable sharing model Although I didn't try dynamics. I'm guessing it's a suitable alternative.
  - thomasrognon 6y ago
    We don't currently have automation, but we plan on having it ready either Q3 or Q4 this year (we might do mobile first, it depends on demand). Thanks for signing up, we'll reach out to you soon!
neves 6y ago
Aren't both of them copies of Trello. They even copy Joel's description of the application as a list of lists: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-different/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-diff...
- cdmoyer 6y ago
  I don't think they're in the same space. Trello is a list of todo lists. Whereas Airtable and lists are for data you'd put in a spreadsheet or database.
  - monadic2 6y ago
    Trello is moving into this space with some of their automation plugins.
coronadisaster 6y ago
Can't they separate UX from the rest? and have 2 UX for the same product?
- awad 6y ago
  I would say that often leads to poor UX
- cjsawyer 6y ago
  Windows 8 is a good example of why that might not work.
travbrack 6y ago
You can add views and leave the old ones in place
ddrt 6y ago
Wait, you’re talking about the same company that had clippy, and moves around their ribbon as if the plot is none of our business?
tikiman163 6y ago
Microsoft has been doing a lot of this lately. Skype needed a massive overhaul to keep up so they made a Slack clone (Teams) that will slowly take over as people decide to switch. AWS and Atlassian products are polular? They create Azure and Azure Devops, which replaces Team Foundations and Visual Studios Online. Admittedly, in that last one they actually just upgraded Visual Studio Online to turn it into Azure Devops and added new features.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> How do you upgrade the UX of a legacy product like Access without pissing off everyone? Make a new opt-in UX supporting the same backend features (meaning that you need new features to support both) and maintain both. But it's expensive, so eventually you hope to merge them or kill one, which is where the risk of people getting pissed off arises again. GMail/Inbox, for example.

ijidak 6y ago

Microsoft's modus operandi is copy, defeat, repeat. It's a very profitable strategy, though perhaps less charismatic. Other companies do this too, but I've seen few tech companies as good at copy, defeat, repeat as Microsoft. In this same vein, they rarely try to take an old product and radically update it (at least not with success). Partially because it's harder to make an exact copy of a new software concept with an existing technology. They prefer to abandon existing products. (Unless the computing industry at large still gives the space mindshare, or the profits are too delicious to let go of.) As I think about it.... It's sort of like Fortune 500 level FOMO... Disclosure: I used to work at Microsoft. Love the company. But get irritated that their strategy often seems capricious -- chasing the latest industry squirrel.

viraptor 6y ago
> few tech companies as good at copy, defeat, repeat as Microsoft. It was called Embrace, Extend, Extinguish internally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
- robomc 6y ago
  Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is something different. It's about adopting standards in order to break them and gradually lock people into proprietary variants. This guy is talking about just copying existing products.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

specialist 6y ago

Access is my favorite Microsoft product. A web-based Access has always been a great idea. Alas. I'm still angry Microsoft reneged on the promised migration path from workgroup to client/server. Like the people burned by Google's abandonment of beloved product & projects, I will never again trust Microsoft enough to actually use their stuff voluntarily. I'm fresh out of goodwill. (Much as I like SQL/Server, my projects have always had a Plan B.)

balakk 6y ago

FWIW, Sharepoint (online) has had a Lists feature for decades now, and is as prevalent in Enterprises as Access was, if not more. It just so happens to be that Teams is the flavor of the future. So more stuff from SharePoint comes into Teams. Not everything is a conspiracy. Disclaimer: work there, but my views..

larrywright 6y ago
The video introduction I watched said that it was built on top of the SharePoint lists feature.
theschmed 6y ago
Hopefully the UX is better than the abysmal current UX for these lists.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

They couldn't keep Access current, or, NOT stuck in the 90's because people would expect their 90's Access files to still work in the new version. It's a weird one because on the one side, backwards compatibility is / has been keeping Microsoft behind for years. On the other, it's why so many companies trust them.

kqvamxurcagg 6y ago

Access still a fantastic product that in no way compares to Airtable and other todo list toys on the market.

nojito 6y ago

The best startup ideas are simply taking a piece of the massive office ecosystem and marketing it better than Microsoft. Joel jokes about it here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

tosers4 6y ago
yes, and they they are acquired by microsoft (or other giant) or microsoft simply makes a clone, just like what's happening here, or with teams, or todos or any other recent MS app. MSFT is just too big. Trillion dollar companies are a sin on this earth

dragonwriter 6y ago

> Maybe they should have invested in keeping Access current instead of leaving it stuck in the 90s? Or maybe they were right to protect the enterprises with big legacy investments and will have relatively little trouble leveraging their entrenched position and vast resources to make a good-enough player in the new market once someone else has proven it to win by greater integration with Microsoft’s existing services. I mean, that's been a fairly consistent (though not 100% so) recipe for success for Microsoft for quite a while.

kjaftaedi 6y ago

I love Microsoft Access and think it's a great tool, but am struggling to think of any good business use cases that aren't covered better by Microsoft PowerBI