Google's AirTable Rival, Tables, Graduates From Beta

Last fall, Google's in-house incubator Area 120 introduced a new work-tracking tool called Tables, an AirTable (a San Francisco-based startup that makes cloud-based spreadsheet collaboration software and is valued at $5.77 billion) rival that allows for tracking projects more efficiently using automation. Today, Google says Tables will officially "graduate" from Area 120 to become an official Google product by joining Google Cloud, which it expects to complete in the next year. From a report: The Tables project was started by long-time Google employee, now Tables' GM Tim Gleason, who spent 10 years at the company and many more before that in the tech industry. He said he was inspired to work on Tables because he always had a difficult time tracking projects, as teams shared notes and tasks across different documents, which quickly got out of date.

[...] Another factor that prompted Tables' adoption was how quickly people could be productive, thanks in part to its ability to integrate with existing data warehouses and other services. Currently, Tables supports Office 365, Microsoft Access, Google Sheets, Slack, Salesforce, Box and Dropbox, for example. Tables was one of only a few Area 120 projects to launch with a paid business model, along with ticket seller Fundo, conversational ads platform AdLingo and Google's recently launched Orion WiFi. During its beta, an individual could use Tables for free, with support for up to 100 tables and 1,000 rows. The paid plan was supposed to cost $10 per user per month, with support for up to 1,000 tables and 10,000 rows. This plan also included support for larger attachments, more actions and advanced history, sharing, forms, automation and views.

That Tables Guy.

[Ostracus]

Some guy named Bobby is really going to enjoy this.

Cancelled in 3.. 2..

[awwshit]

Like most new Google stuff I won't use it. They will cancel this in a couple of years and leave their users hanging. No thanks.

And they want to charge for it? I'm not paying for a product where there is no support or just a user forum.

Keep your crap, Google.

Re:

[jrumney]

Not only is there the very high risk they will cancel it, they have geoblocked it to US only, which makes no sense for a cloud service.

Re:

[bn-7bc]

to words that explains the reason for this perfectly: regulatory compliance. In particular GDPR, you see google can't mine the hell out of data belonging(ish) to EU citizens so why devote resources to less profitable users?

Re:

[pacinpm]

Not only is there the very high risk they will cancel it, they have geoblocked it to US only, which makes no sense for a cloud service.

You are right:

"Tables is not yet available
The Tables beta is currently available in the U.S."

I checked from Europe.

Re:

[fermion]

There are two risk factors here. One is that it is paid. Not sure if paying to get emails when projects are due is worth anything. It seems to be for in open tent project who just has everyone put all their notes in excel,

Second Google business this to mine data for sales to advertisers. If a product is mostly school children collaborating, it gets canceled. And I never understood what business would give away all their trade secrets to Google.

Re:

[SirSlud]

And I never understood what business would give away all their trade secrets to Google.

That's on you. Google reads emails - so they can advertise to you. Google doesn't read your files on google drive (although they do hash them and read names ..) Their data policies explicitly state they don't. If they don't follow their own data usage policies, then nobody does. If you don't believe policies, and you truly believe people have no way of discovering that Google is reading the contents of files (for what p

Re:

[fermion]

The billion dollar company is not what it used to be the company is 7 billion and is just seems to send reminder emails. There is a SPAC whose one asset is a small deli worth 2.1 billion.

Re:

[Entrope]

There is a SPAC whose one asset is a small deli worth 2.1 billion.

Not $2.1B, "only" about $70M [sec.report]. (They pushed around $100M valuation.)

So something we never heard of..

[poptopdrop]

... now has a rival that Google will be EOL'ing in two years.

Way to go, editors.

Tables

[rlwinm]

Pied Piper is Tables!

Really?

[backslashdot]

He said he was inspired to work on Tables because he always had a difficult time tracking projects, as teams shared notes and tasks across different documents, which quickly got out of date.

Oh really? So it wasn't saw AirTables and thought "hmm we should copy that"?

Re:

[Ostracus]

Maybe next time he'll copy Obsidian [obsidian.md].

Re:

[The Evil Atheist]

Modern tech no longer acknowledges the existence or influence of other things.

Take Rust. From the blog articles that get written, you'd think they invented the idea of ownership and scope based lifetimes. Or immutable values. Or locked, reference-counted, variables. Some blog articles even try to pass off LLVM's (an unRusted project much older than Rust) optimizations as being due to Rust.

Every new language's page talks about what features it has, as though it somehow differentiates from other languag

I’m taking up a collection

[93 Escort Wagon]

Let’s all chip in so, when the time comes, we can buy Tables a nice headstone in the Google Graveyard.

Google's in-house incubator Area 120...

[h33t l4x0r]

So Area 51 plus 69? Did that actually get snuck past the grown-ups who sign off on these things?

Re: Google's in-house incubator Area 120...

[calicuse]

Or the grown-ups were thinking "At Area 120, we work on 20% projects 100% of the time." as stated on their website. Not everything is about sex and aliens.