The real power of this product is as a replacement of BI/Visualization tools. Imagine being able to connect Rows to a database and create "governed" sheets that look/work like dashboards with charts, tables, filters, etc.<p>It would be a killer product because most users are familiar with spreadsheets already. Many users end-up copying data from dashboards into spreadsheets (gsheet, excel, etc) so why not skipping the intermediaries and go straight to delivering a hybrid of dashboards and spreadsheets.<p>Lots of potential.
Quite nice but I wonder why the scene for this kind of tools is stuck in the Spreadsheets and pipes interface. Definitely powerful, Excel itself is an amazing tool, having an "Excel" that can fetch data is 10X more powerful as we see with Google Docs or other products too.<p>However, using these still feels wrong for me. It seems to be simplifying some stuff but can get very complex quickly and hard to debug when you want to do something more involved. At that point, writing code gets much easier than managing ever expanding complexity of the No-Code solutions.<p>IMHO someone some day will crack it and programming for data processing will become a visual endeavour.
Compliments to see this thrive since 2016 with that large of a team! I had to laugh at the Berlin (ex) Rocket company logos; this age old Excel style data formatting which looks nice and custom at first glance brings back memories of inevitably ending up in swamps of versions, custom tweaks and data inaccuracies. Arguably, most of these problems can be well mitigated by a cloud hosted solution like yours!<p>But the audience being non-tech people, the look is pretty fantastic.<p>From a technical perspective:
Care to share how you do data integration (batch/ stream/ mix? All hosted hyperscaler or something like Airbyte)?
How do you address what I would think are dynamic load peaks during business days?
I don't have much of an opinion on the product, it seems fine, but I greatly enjoyed the cute little spreadsheet styling on the pricing table[1], it actually made me laugh. Good design, nice work.<p>[1]: <a href="https://rows.com/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://rows.com/pricing</a>
Sorry but online tools like this are still Fail.<p>Not everyone has online access 24x7: I don't have it where I live; I travel enough for work to not have it on travel about 50% of the time; I work with customers to whom we sell product, who Air-Gap their central operations for security reasons. Etc. Etc. I don't know what market was imagined but there are broad swaths that will never be accessible to you with the first design mistake of "it's convenient for US"!
Looks great, and I like that there is a lot of overlap with Grist: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25257521" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25257521</a>, <a href="https://www.getgrist.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.getgrist.com</a> (of which I am a founder). The differences are interesting: rows.com seems more focused on external integrations; Grist has API but is more focused on powerful formulas and layouts for working within the data.<p>I imagine the overlap will only increase. I take it as confirmation that these are good ideas to pursue.
This is the tech that may be the future of computing. All of your company's data stored, and handled, in Rows.<p>Or not. The chief concern is that modern data protection laws would make all columns of these tables unreadable without specific sanction. You're not free to address any cell in any table, just a pre-cleared strict subset, which no longer allows you to take advantage of easy aggregation and filtering of data.
I am not that familiar with theses new sheet like apps. Although I like them because I hate sheets/excel. But can anyone point out the main focus difference between this and Airtable?
as someone responsible for a small nonprofit that runs on google sheets, this product is super exciting.<p>a suggestion: key to us adopting this would be the migration story. I’d love if that was clearly presented on the website.
How is this different from Airtable? Also I always wanted something that could connect directly to python in the background instead of super clunky pipeline building importing xls etc.
Ha, that's $ome domain name.<p>Also comparing product to Yahoo Pipes in the original post, how many prospective customers are gonna know what that is other than a handful of us around here? haha
If you haven't looked into it yet - Google Apps Script [0] is an incredibly powerful system when combined with Google Sheets. You can integrate lots of business processes and external systems (rest,soap,databases etc) together and integrate with classic spreadsheet functionality, we use it a lot in our business!<p>[0] <a href="https://developers.google.com/apps-script" rel="nofollow">https://developers.google.com/apps-script</a>