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Comment by t0mas88 | Hacker News Reader

I'm very eager to see the Office 365 answer to this.

Microsoft is the one that needs to come up with a defensive play here, because this is an area where Excel is used in many businesses both small and large. I'm guessing Microsoft could do a better job than AWS integrating this with Excel and the Office 365 or MS Teams kind of UI to make it feel at home to their users.

On the other hand, AWS is ahead now and likely to start integrating this with the rest of their services if it takes off.

Either way, I think this can be an interesting development for a lot of half baked Excel processes that are everywhere in a typical company.

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It's called Power Apps https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/

The "Power Family" or Power Platform (PowerApps, PowerAutomate, PowerBI, Power Virtual Agents) are inarguable the most mature bundle of WYSIWYG, visual data flows, and data graphing on the market. It's not just about the app building itself, but all the ways to get data in and out of it, and what else you can do with the data once youve gathered it. Salesforce is probably the other company in the same league.

Microsoft clearly has a branding / marketing problem, where people have ignored them for too long, and or are just reconsidering products Microsoft has had on the market for 10 year (another thread where people said Office on the web has caught up to gdocs, whereas id say theyve been ahead of it for at least 4 years.)

Mirosoft Lists (their Airtable) is a new interface over SharePoint lists. SharePoint lists are one of the data sources for the Power Platform, but so is Dynamics CRM, ERP etc.

https://powerplatform.microsoft.com/

> another thread where people said Office on the web has caught up to gdocs, whereas id say theyve been ahead of it for at least 4 years.

This issue is that gdocs and co are free while even for just web word you need a subscription. so the only ppl who use it are ppl willing to pay, the freeloaders only see it when their company decides to switch back to MS apps after being in googleville for a few years.

Free outlook.com (Hotmail) account includes OneDrive (live) and Word online.

Powerapps I think still charges per user login, That is where I think Honeycomb wins, I expect Powerapps, and google appsheet to drop charges soon.

>>because this is an area where Excel is used in many businesses both small and large

Those people are not going to be giving up Excel for this. I have tried for years to get people to use other better tools than excel, it is a non-starter

Power Excel Users will not stop using Excel for either PowerApps or this AWS Product

Yep, getting people off Excel for fully packaged software is hard enough.

Microsoft can do a much better job than Amazon if they created a competing product. They might take the quicker route and buy AirTable maybe?

I can foresee Microsoft and other bigger players entering the no code market seriously in the near future (though one can say Microsoft already has power apps etc).

Didn't Microsoft just release their Airtable competitor? Lists? Did everyone already forget about that? Seems pretty comparable to this Amazon offering other then the mobile UI WYSIWYG builder.

They don't push it as an "app builder" though, more of a web based access that is heavily tied to office/teams.

Power Apps is Microsoft's version of this. It is actually quite popular.

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