>And you know what's the biggest thing holding them back? The fear that people will make fun of the first thing they launch.
Good.
The software world is absolutely flooded with half baked crap backed by expensive marketing. As a software user it's a waste of my time when somebody releases "A Simply Remarkable Spreadsheet" that allows you to "organize and work with them in a whole new intuitive way" and it lacks the basic features I expect from a spreadsheet (I suppose that is indeed remarkable). Worse, it leads to a situation where customers don't trust software developers to provide the things they say they are providing.
What would you have us do? Not criticize massively hyped app releases that are backed by millions of dollars of VC money because we might hurt somebodies feelings? If you are going to make a big fanfare about your new 'spreadsheet' app, then you have to be prepared for the (predictable) negative reaction when it turns out it isn't actually a spreadsheet at all. Don't get pissed off when it gets criticism after you flood all the tech news sites with press releases and submit your site to all the aggregators and email dozens of bloggers.
The people doing this are savvy and know what they are doing, which is basically conning users with false promises. They know it will earn them criticism from people who are paying attention, they don't care, they are in it for the money. Your portrayal of the innocent, uncertain, timid startup CEO is pretty laughable. These are business graduates that decided to go into software startups because they think there is more money in it than investment banking at the moment, many have never written any software themselves.
You can whine all you want but customers are always going to complain when the product does not meet the description. It's really quite simple to avoid this though: stop lying in your marketing.
Edit: I didn't mean to make it sound like I think the Grid folks themselves are actually upset about this criticism, I'm sure they are not. They must have had many meetings trying to decide if they should call it a spreadsheet even though it isn't, and they obviously decided to do it because they feel they will get more attention as a 'mobile spreadsheet' rather than some vaguely defined data organiser. It was a calculated move that seems to be paying off at the initial launch at least, since the app is getting far more attention than most.
But it clearly is a spreadsheet. It's moving in a direction spreadsheets haven't gone before, and in order to innovate that way they've made some decisions about which classical features to defer. How could they have done otherwise?
The research literature on spreadsheet users shows that about half of them rely on computation with formulas and half don't. (That data is old and spotty but it's the best we have. Joel Spolsky made a similar point a few months ago.) So a sizeable chunk of spreadsheet users aren't going to mind, or even notice, that computation wasn't prioritized here. Those users probably aren't well represented on HN but they probably are a good fit for a tablet spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet space is remarkable for how little innovation it has seen relative to how massive its user base is. Has there been a fundamental innovation since pivot tables? That was 20 years ago, and even then something of a hack, designed to answer Lotus Improv. I guess collaborative spreadsheets count (Google Docs) but that feels more like adding in a generic modern feature than rethinking spreadsheets per se. We need to see a lot more of the latter. I suppose I should disclose that I'm working on it too, albeit at the computational end.
This clearly has some limited organizational functionality, but no analysis (that I can tell, at least.)
I think the argument about what is or is not a spreadsheet is pretty much semantics and nothing else, but I think it might be a bad move for Grid to call itself a spreadsheet app (note: I do not know if Grid calls itself a spreadsheet app) since the vast majority of consumers are going to equate that with Excel or Numbers.
I wish I had read your comment before posting mine. While you go a bit far in the polemical direction I find myself strongly reacting to the naked flogging that I am subjected to as this boom advances. In 2007 you could just read about programming and worry about the looming depression.
Now we are all expected to pitch in and enrich everyone around us who can network a little bit.
Let's innovate some ways to get water to the heartland! Whoops too hard, let's innovate javascript.
Another problem is that the HN crowd has been getting inundated with a ton of 'Show HN: AppName v0.001' posts for a while now. There are some obvious benefits to doing this, like getting early feedback from tech-oriented people before chasing the general public's attention, but I wouldn't be surprised if the HN crowd is getting a little weary of wading through the onslaught of such posts.
Note: I actually think Grid's v1 was pretty well put together (based on the demo video). I am mostly referring to the half-backed Bootstrap sites with nothing more than a sign up form.
Good.
The software world is absolutely flooded with half baked crap backed by expensive marketing. As a software user it's a waste of my time when somebody releases "A Simply Remarkable Spreadsheet" that allows you to "organize and work with them in a whole new intuitive way" and it lacks the basic features I expect from a spreadsheet (I suppose that is indeed remarkable). Worse, it leads to a situation where customers don't trust software developers to provide the things they say they are providing.
What would you have us do? Not criticize massively hyped app releases that are backed by millions of dollars of VC money because we might hurt somebodies feelings? If you are going to make a big fanfare about your new 'spreadsheet' app, then you have to be prepared for the (predictable) negative reaction when it turns out it isn't actually a spreadsheet at all. Don't get pissed off when it gets criticism after you flood all the tech news sites with press releases and submit your site to all the aggregators and email dozens of bloggers.
The people doing this are savvy and know what they are doing, which is basically conning users with false promises. They know it will earn them criticism from people who are paying attention, they don't care, they are in it for the money. Your portrayal of the innocent, uncertain, timid startup CEO is pretty laughable. These are business graduates that decided to go into software startups because they think there is more money in it than investment banking at the moment, many have never written any software themselves.
You can whine all you want but customers are always going to complain when the product does not meet the description. It's really quite simple to avoid this though: stop lying in your marketing.
Edit: I didn't mean to make it sound like I think the Grid folks themselves are actually upset about this criticism, I'm sure they are not. They must have had many meetings trying to decide if they should call it a spreadsheet even though it isn't, and they obviously decided to do it because they feel they will get more attention as a 'mobile spreadsheet' rather than some vaguely defined data organiser. It was a calculated move that seems to be paying off at the initial launch at least, since the app is getting far more attention than most.