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Comment by ethbr0 | Hacker News Reader

This is UiPath's IDE UI: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lgiChrgzzoU&t=2m28s

This is Blue Prism's (new!) IDE UI: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KIaPsr0U_sU&t=5m23s

IMHO, Blue Prism feels a lot like a product of IBM. A tool where inefficiency and steep learning curve matter less than guardrails to be able to staff 100 minimally educated "developers" on a project and get something the client will sign off on.

There's a reason UiPath's target customer is "everyone." Blue Prism's target customer is "automation consultancies."

And I can say this for certainty, because when we tried to buy Blue Prism, we had to convince them to think about selling to us. They know their UX is terrible.

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I see. UX aside though, is there any advantage to Blue Prism? Just wondering if there's room for both here. Also what are your thoughts on the Microsoft offering?

Blue Prism makes it almost impossible not to bash out something resembling proper, abstracted object oriented design (reusable objects, methods on those objects, etc).

Unfortunately, it does this in a hamfisted way that makes the product harder to learn and use than it needs to be. It's fine if that's all you use, but you're not going to be able to quickly crosstrain / ramp someone up on it.

IMHO, that defeats a core value proposition: enable non-developers to develop.

I've demo'd the MS offering (Power Automate), but haven't daily driven it. It's slick.

The question I have is where MS is positioning it. I don't think it's an independent product, so I think they might see it as filling in a gap in the O365 offering? I don't think legacy support is a major point for them, which will probably be good enough for most people.

Ah that's a good explanation of Blue Prism vs UI Path.

I think MS is planning to offer it in the O365 stack which means if its half decent it will probably eat UI Path's lunch?

> I don't think legacy support is a major point for them, which will probably be good enough for most people.

Interesting that you say that, I thought that would be one of the primary usecases of RPA? Legacy apps where there's no possibility of an API.

Legacy app support takes a huge amount of work. And probably doesn't have the profit margins MS likes to see, and/or enough of a market to impact their bottom line.

My guess would be they'll develop really tight integration with the Office suite, wrap a thin shim around Active Accessibility [0] / UI Automation (/ whatever they want to call it), and call it a day.

Also, there's a ton of Java stuff out there that gets very esoteric. And that doesn't seem like something MS is interested in expanding into.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Active_Accessibili...

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