this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
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A rant on products without purpose (fasterandworse.com)
submitted 4 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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from @fasterandworse of this parish

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[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 21 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

Browse the web sites of Notion, Figma, or Slack

I did out of curiosity, especially since I've never heard about the first two and "Figma" sounds like a bad attempt at a Ligma joke.

Notion

Tagline:

Write, plan, organize, play Turn ideas into action with Notion’s AI-powered workspace.

Plus this gem

"Your AI everything app." ~ Forbes

Wait I thought X was the everything app.

I scrolled through and I have no idea why anyone would pay for this. It doesn't seem to be able to do anything that a GitLab instance can't and "AI" here just looks like a hook to ChatGPT.

Figma

balls! haha

How you design, align, and build matters. Do it together with Figma.

What the hell does "align" mean here? Align like a div to be centered? It seems to be a design tool so that's what I assume, but it's a weird thing to focus on.

Co-create in one space Work together in real time and empower designers to create in new ways.

Okay, this at least gives me a product pitch - design tool with real-time sharing like in Google Docs. That sounds actually useful.

Keep workflows efficient with tools that give every team visibility throughout the process.

... aaand this is just word salad, you lost me.

The rest looks like a regular pitch for a prototype tool for UX, which I think is a pretty specific and useful tool though, so I'm not 100% sure why it'd fit with the theme of the blogpost. Maybe I'm missing something, I never actually dealt with serious UX design.

Slack

This one was I surprised by since I thought I knew what the entire Slack product is - it's a chat. You have channels, direct messages, and pings. That's about it, right?

Move faster with your tools in one place Automate away routine tasks with the power of generative AI and simplify your workflow with all your favourite apps ready to go in Slack.

God what.

The rest is a normal pitch, flexible communications, remote work, channels, etc. But why would you start with AI? Again, Slack is a chat app why would you want gen AI in a chat app?

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

haha, thanks for this. those three are my go-to "big 3" examples because I'm convinced one of them will acquire and absorb the other two

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Slack is already owned by Salesforce. Adobe tried to buy Figma but competition authorities blocked it. Notion is still owned by its founders and funders.

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 9 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I didn't know about Slack and Salesforce. But, man, what a perfect match of captive userbase softwares

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 10 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Salesforce is so funny to me cause cloud computing, databases, large datasets, etc. are basically all I do professionally; I've met people from Salesforce, I've seen talks from Salesforce; I'm more-or-less aware of how Tableu works, which they own.

Gun to my head, I would never be able to tell you what the fuck that company sells. For all I can tell it's door-to-door cookie Sales by a Force of girl scouts. I was to their site more than a dozen times, I read through their wiki article, I tried to find out wtf they do, no luck. It's like an SCP monster that erases all prior knowledge of it you had the moment you stop looking. They played everyone for absolute fools.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

CRM as a service with a fucking ton of whatever dumb bullshit they think they might be able to sell you on top

the CRM as a service bit more or less works? probably? with work at your end? We use it at the day job and it's like better than not. It's the ultimate boring-but-functional product for enterprises.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

It’s the ultimate boring-but-functional product for enterprises.

I'm sorry, but that is already taken by Excel.

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 4 points 4 months ago

@V0ldek NoNoNo, Excel is *sometimes* useful. For ultimate uselessness, try PowerPoint.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 4 points 4 months ago

point

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 4 months ago

now now david, you know you're contractually obligated to say CRM for enterprise. always.

SFDC murderninja squads have been dispatched to ..resolve.. this infraction.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Gun to my head, I would never be able to tell you what the fuck that company sells

similar to IBM's business really: invoices, lawsuits, and (at meta level) Vibes

Benioff is quite a piece of work

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

But invoices have to be for something, right? Like IBM has hardware and the best-in-industry vendor lock-in. My alma mater is going to be paying for that IBM Mainframe in the basement that runs the entire fucking school until the Sun itself abandons us.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 3 points 4 months ago

No, invoices need to be for “something”. There are many, many businesses in this world that make constant bank on bullshit

Your alma mater isn’t paying megabux to support that mainframe itself, relative to IBM’s total income, but I bet you’d find many extras tacked on that make a significant contribution

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 4 months ago

it's almost like antitrust enforcement would be a good thing

[–] ebu@awful.systems 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

It doesn’t seem to be able to do anything that a GitLab instance can’t

i didn't believe you, but yeah, just learned GitLab has a wiki editor. so yeah, this covers like 95% of the things i once used Notion for. i guess if i want to be pedantic, Notion had database relations between tables that, as the name implies, allowed it to act a bit like an relational database. (e.g. allowing columns of tables to be limited to the values of rows of other tables). admittedly a little cool but in my experience was not much more useful than a simple table

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 4 months ago (2 children)

just learned GitLab has a wiki editor.

And it's had it at least since 2017, which is before anyone has even heard of Notion.

Selling shit you can have for free, the closed-source business story.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

what notion is selling is hosting

[–] ebu@awful.systems 5 points 4 months ago

this is funny to me because it took Notion until late 2021 to introduce simple, non-database tables (since the database tables were often large, unwieldy, and introduced way too much overhead to just write a simple rows-and-columns spreadsheet, something that's been a thing in GitHub Flavored Markdown since at least 2009

[–] jonhendry@awful.systems 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

One wonders if one of those ready to go apps in Slack is a Slack app that runs inside of Slack.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The moment someone integrates Slack with Teams and Teams with Slack at the same time a black hole will engulf the Earth. This is the xrisk we should be worried about.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm tempted, but im still team moon.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

But what if Slack got mad at us?

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 3 points 4 months ago

Ill just uninstall it.

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 17 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

thanks! I had to squeeze one out to avoid a whole year passing since my last blog post. Hopefully will keep 'em coming from here on. Settled nicely in Amsterdam now

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Nice one :) I’m surprised you didn’t work this one in somewhere there

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I am going to keep that for a future one for sure. This stuff needs an anthem

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

haha, thought you'd enjoy it

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I can't help think of this song whenever I hear about the day's new tech product that has the potential to change the world https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BngCSGJJNo

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 7 points 4 months ago

the key line is right at the end "elements of the past and the future, combining to make something not quite as a good as either"

[–] sorter_plainview 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

What is the publishing platform you are using? I have been looking for a plain and clean good looking long form publishing for some time.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

looks like wordpress with a custom "faw" theme

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

that's correct. faw for faster and worse. I keep it in a public repo if you're interested. (I don't maintain it like a public repo, though. so lemme know if you have questions) https://github.com/stevesydney/faw

[–] sorter_plainview 5 points 4 months ago

Oh nice.. Thanks. Let me take a look.

[–] self@awful.systems 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

welcome back Steve! I have got to get some of my writing into readable shape too.

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 3 points 4 months ago

Hey, thanks! Sorry to respond so late. I have been locking myself out of socials during the week to get stuff done. I just published a new one too, so it's working :)

[–] zbyte64@awful.systems 7 points 4 months ago

I've arrived to too many projects that were ridiculously over complicated because of "potential" that is never realized.