A rant on products without purpose
A rant on products without purpose
Potential in place of purpose is what separates an iPad from an iPod, blockchains from databases, and generative AI from text editors. The more complex the product, the more potential it has to have potential. The more it can distract from it's own lack of usefulness.
from @fasterandworse of this parish
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
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.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?
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
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.
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
Nice one :) I’m surprised you didn’t work this one in somewhere there
welcome back Steve! I have got to get some of my writing into readable shape too.
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 :)
I've arrived to too many projects that were ridiculously over complicated because of "potential" that is never realized.