Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal

Perhaps Notion and all the project planning apps like Linear, ClickUp, Asana?

But if the revenues were hit this might be a home run, given AI could replace all of airtable in about a weekend e2e, but then again a competent team of 2-3 devs could have done it over a few weeks, it wasn't ever really about the product quality.

My condolences to all the Airtable users, who are about to get fleeced now, they should consider moving to anything else, even vibe coded slop might be ok.

Nobody wants to talk about or reveal the AI or software margins.

Will cause everyone to panic once they see how low the margins are getting year over year.

But maybe this is because I do a very basic usage. Uninstalled, though.

It's really every category of commercial activity. Restaurants food quality, cable tv channels, movie sequels, home appliances, airline travel, theme parks, etc.

For years, I had a particular local HVAC company do my twice-a-year maintenance on my air conditioner and furnace. I liked the owner and he had a crew of older experienced guys that knew what they were doing. He then sold the business to another owner and he completely changed out the crew to kids that barely look 18 years old. The young inexperienced techs didn't have the skills to diagnose anything on their own. They always had to phone the home office and use their smartphones to send video/photos of what they're looking at to the more knowledgeable technician at the office. That way, the senior guy sitting at the desk can walk them through what to do next. That's when I realized the financial game the new owner was playing: hire new kids that just completed their 3-month HVAC tech certificate for cheap wages but still charge the same high prices that the old owner was charging for experienced techs. And only pay for one expensive senior tech back at the office to be a "shared resource" for all the clueless techs out in the field. That type of "enshittification" didn't require venture capital, or private equity, or ads. The common pattern of degrading a product or service has the same thing in common ... humans.

The vast majority of enshittification is not caused by private equity or ads.

I feel like everyone I know/knew who was really into Airtable was pretty sophisticated and used it for complex data wrangling that was beyond the typical tools they had access to.

But they were often solo operators for that data because whatever they were wrangling wasn't worth putting into a database or investing in more robust tools (from a company perspective)..

So perhaps you are correct.