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Most of these apps are useless garbage nobody wants and few people are proud of working on. Even the biggest flagship apps are pretty thin - organized hitchhiki

Most of these apps are useless garbage nobody wants and few people are proud of working on. Even the biggest flagship apps are pretty thin - organized hitchhiking, a replacement for television, a new modern version of the Sears catalog. This "article" is just an ad for Airtable which looks like a reasonably competent low-code system. Commercial low-code systems (e.g. ServiceNow as a more entrenched established comparison) exist so as to lock you into a platform for which you'll pay exorbitant per-user pricing that really starts to hurt as you scale up. Maybe there's value to be realized by letting individual teams have influence over their business processes while still using a centrally organized system; but there are many significant costs to locking into something like this, and when you hit its limits you're still going to need coders and custom middleware, all of which will again be a sunk cost into a proprietary system you can never have real control over.

reilly3000 6y ago
Having built a lot of glue apps with Airtable it’s definitely the case that coders and middleware get involved fairly quickly beyond spreadsheet use cases. I’m quite certain that Airtable > Spreadsheets, if for nothing else that field types, views, comments, and permissions are far more ergonomically implemented. The 50K row limit is quickly met for some use cases. Airtable proved out visual SQL and now is going full no-code with their Apps system. I think this makes for a big opportunity for a novel no-code OSS tool. Node-Red is fantastic, but having that central data layer at hand is a killer feature.
haswell 6y ago
> Maybe there's value to be realized by letting individual teams have influence over their business processes while still using a centrally organized system This is absolutely one of the core reasons cited by large orgs that purchase these solutions. And it's part of the sales motion from these vendors. When Bob in Finance needs to simplify one of his monthly close processes, he's not likely to get any traction asking for a new greenfield internal business app. But if his company has an investment in of of these platforms (like ServiceNow, SalesForce, Mendix, etc), it's possible that his team can take it upon themselves to solve their problem without having to get "real" dev teams involved. This brings issues along with it for sure: governance, quality, and as you mention: lock-in. But quite a few of these departmental apps become quite useful/popular, and enable teams to innovate on their own. I do worry about the future (~5-10 years down the road) when the proliferation of these apps becomes a problem of its own, at which point I fully expect to see a slew of new startups claiming to solve this problem. The better vendors in this space are already baking "governance, scalability, CICD..." into their products for this reason.

reilly3000 6y ago

Having built a lot of glue apps with Airtable it’s definitely the case that coders and middleware get involved fairly quickly beyond spreadsheet use cases. I’m quite certain that Airtable > Spreadsheets, if for nothing else that field types, views, comments, and permissions are far more ergonomically implemented. The 50K row limit is quickly met for some use cases. Airtable proved out visual SQL and now is going full no-code with their Apps system. I think this makes for a big opportunity for a novel no-code OSS tool. Node-Red is fantastic, but having that central data layer at hand is a killer feature.

haswell 6y ago

> Maybe there's value to be realized by letting individual teams have influence over their business processes while still using a centrally organized system This is absolutely one of the core reasons cited by large orgs that purchase these solutions. And it's part of the sales motion from these vendors. When Bob in Finance needs to simplify one of his monthly close processes, he's not likely to get any traction asking for a new greenfield internal business app. But if his company has an investment in of of these platforms (like ServiceNow, SalesForce, Mendix, etc), it's possible that his team can take it upon themselves to solve their problem without having to get "real" dev teams involved. This brings issues along with it for sure: governance, quality, and as you mention: lock-in. But quite a few of these departmental apps become quite useful/popular, and enable teams to innovate on their own. I do worry about the future (~5-10 years down the road) when the proliferation of these apps becomes a problem of its own, at which point I fully expect to see a slew of new startups claiming to solve this problem. The better vendors in this space are already baking "governance, scalability, CICD..." into their products for this reason.