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A rant on products without purpose
(fasterandworse.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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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:
Plus this gem
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
What the hell does "align" mean here? Align like a
divto be centered? It seems to be a design tool so that's what I assume, but it's a weird thing to focus on.Okay, this at least gives me a product pitch - design tool with real-time sharing like in Google Docs. That sounds actually useful.
... 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?
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?
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
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.
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