I don't see people switching to Claude sheets overnight & the messaging from anthropic will likely become less effusive over time (short-/medium-term). But I'd be surprised if this doesn't make significant inroads in the long-term.
Figma is the default for teams but is losing a lot of stickiness.
I don't think there is a reasonable expectation that these new tools will simply end Google Workspace. Google are going to be just fine to do whatever they want with their stuff, and they have the customers.
Anthropic can just do this for a new generation of people and businesses, and establish themselves here over time.
I don't quite follow you. Are you talking about Mermaid's lack of decision when laying out diagrams?
I'm working on a tool that makes it easier for me to work with mermaid diagrams (mermaid is a great intermediary format for representing certain types of information, e.g. software architecure, but its syntax does not work well with my brain), so I'm interested in alternative concepts that make it easier to work with these types of things.
What these tools are generally missing is a way for the user to "fix stuff" that isnt just prompting. Once they add things like that, added to model improvements... it's just going to be a cost story: which one is cheaper.
For me, this is simply a first-party UI for Claude. So they have better control over the presentation layer + some extra features on top.
It's not meant to be equivalent to Google Sheets or Excel.
So yes, not dead and clearly good for people who want that additional layer of control, but also nowhere where it used to be.
Whiteboarding is the main thing I do in my AI build processes outside of Claude - if they can do it native + multiplayer, it's going to be a huge UX improvement for a lot of users.
I read this as: We'll build anything and everything into Claude eventually.
How does this work long-term? Is the new reality going to be picking an AI provider for all of your SaSS tooling, similar to Cloud providers for infra? Hopefully competition thrives.
Dots in particular display some insidious methodology, they've hidden the "programmable" portions of an agent. They want to make it 'magic' (all your work goes through a single tool) but... that's pretty much exactly what businesses DON'T want. We need to see what it's doing, accessing, working with, underlying data, etc... It's an explicit business requirement for us.
The more they can 'hide' what the backend does, the harder it is to get away from the product.
Buuuuut, I don't think it's going to work. I can still export it somehow if I want to, and it would probably take 10-15 minutes... The whole point of these agents is that they're 'plug and play' with whatever technology you want.
And if they don't build them this way, someone will whip up an open source version that does it cheaper and more transparently in a couple of weeks.
Software being free now hits both of these companies exactly where they want protection.
Well, isn't that the natural end result of an AGI?
No more software, no more deciding what apps you need. It's all just Claude. Except now you're pulling 10kW to add up a column of numbers.
I suspect the goal is partly starting a walled garden.
"Llms are interchangeable? Our harness/toolset isn't".
It's a way to get a moat I guess.
It doesn't sound like a business for the scale they're aiming for though. Taking a bite of the MS office's pie doesn't seem to me like a trillion dollar company move.
The rest of the world moves on using LLMs as tools.
Anthropic is eventually bought and stripped for parts.
“Please remove this page break I can’t figure out how to get rid of and someone else added”
Co-pilot: “Sorry I’m unable to do that but you can follows these same instructions you can find on the Internet to accomplish that”.
Claude: “I will literally rebuild Word from the ground up to solve this problem if that’s what it takes (but here is how to actually solve your problem), oh and do you want this exported in the best format for this software, this other software, or in these 15 file formats? Oh I don’t have native capabilities for that format - ok let’s build a script and convert….”
You get the picture. Competition is here, and it will get even better. Many SaaS companies will die. Good. Many of them only delivered short-term value solving artificial constrains or gaps in software.
A typical workflow is: connect via MCP to some data source. Do some stats, transformations, etc. Put the data in a format that Claude understands or will understand better later. Make a UI/story out of it. Keep track of your "things" through visualizations.
Been using this worlflow extensively now. This is their easy wall garden.
They absolutely are. Maybe not quickly (let's face it, Excel users are not sprightly), but this is absolutely going to displace Gsuite, and any Excel users who were thinking of moving to it.
I expect Google will respond.
This project comes from a pure love of grids of numbers - and a deep sense that Excel has failed to keep pace with stuff like columnar data (Apache Arrow), fast queries (Rust Polars), proper number types, etc. so tbh don’t feel very threatened.
Feedback - good and bad very welcome.
Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense if they’d just let Claude connect to your Excel/Google Sheets/whatever?
Doesn’t even need an MCP or official integration at this point, if there’s computer access there’s access to everything.
And why share data when you can own it?
Nobody is replacing excel anywhere.
You now have that app forever and nothing connects it to Claude other than the comment saying "this isn't just rounding — it's the single source of truth for the shared ledger boundary, not a formatting concern."
While I agree that spreadsheets are likely to be used less by regular folk, the idea that we'll become reliant on claude feels unlikely.
For good or bad, big companies run on Excel.
At my last job - a large tech company - if it wasn't in Excel, then engineers and HR wouldn't use it. The team had a tool that collected data from various databases for the end user and did some analytics. The code was in Python. The output was an Excel file.
I asked why they didn't use pandas.
"Because the users are just going to take the output and put it in Excel."
It was a very successful tool. No one needed to use it so we had to ensure users liked it. All due to the team lead's wisdom on how big companies operate.
They also wanted us to autogenerate PowerPoint files. We gave up on that. The spec is a mess.
I used to work as a trader for a major investment bank. Everything was excel. I can’t see it staying that way.
Normies know enough Excel to debug their "code". Will they be able to debug code AI produces?
> I used to work as a trader for a major investment bank. Everything was excel. I can’t see it staying that way.
How much of that Excel usage is part of the regular flow? As in several different teams using and sharing Excel files with a common template, so they can have macros that depend on the shape of data in the spreadsheet?
If the traders are mostly just using it for their own individual analyses, I can believe you. If they're sharing the Excel files across disparate departments ... it will be tougher.
A much simpler solution that a full blown replacement is simply having AI read, understand and edit Excel files. Why go with a completely different solution if the AI can solve all your problems within Excel?
Now it'll be harder to do the same for word and harder still for excel, but word is doable, and claude can build one off tools better than excel can, so I definitely think that MS should be wary.
The "I need some place to organize tabular data" use case is so different that I'm not considering it for the rest of this.
But for actual computation, if you throw it in Claude, it'll figure it out. It's much easier to do than to use Excel. Claude itself isn't limited to Excel; it can use pandas and the much, much improved plotting tools compared to Excel. I'm an OpenAI guy myself and used codecs to have it make me ggplot2 graphs, but then I forgot to specify it and it just used straight-up Python — I think it actually generated them as SVG files. As sad as I was about it, they looked better than the ones I had it make using ggplot2.
Regular Excel doesn't even compare there; not only can ggplot2 make many additional types of graphs, but SVG plotting, Python, and pandas can make literally any chart you want, including things like polar-coordinate charts.
They are shifting to building stuff for agents, not for humans.
either fully commit to disrupting your customers and keep a walled garden or stop building in the space, this incremental approach will only ship confusion
Yeah, if we're done working on it, why are we continuing to work on it? That makes no sense.
These seem like natural extensions that I'm sure will be very useful.
All Anthropic needs is to host an S3 clone and they become the default place to put all your company's data because they are the easiest place to analyze the data.
No company that need that level of data ingest and analysis is using Anthropic's tooling over something that is used industry wide.
And I'd argue they sort of abandoned MCP. Claude's support for it is poor.
There's a reason my co still has Slack and it ain't because of its great features and bug-free app. It's because every written conversation we've ever had is in there.
Let's get Claude office, Claude auth, Claude notebooks.... maybe call it C Suite.
The better solution would be a uniform 'App Suite of the commons' (open-source) with a plugable/switchable data and inference providers.
Reality is, the crazy valuation given to frontier labs will push them to capture more of the value chain, to make it harder for customers to switch models. Having a best-in-class model is not defensible, long term.
ClaudeCloudServices
ClaudeERP
ClaudeCRM
ClaudeNeuralLink
ClaudeConsciousnessUpload
For one, maintaining a lot of apps and connectors costs time and focus for a marginal return. Also it burns relationships with everyone building on top of your API if they can be disrupted anytime.
Their competition is offering good enough models for vastly better prices and they are making products that their customers don't need.
I feel like there will be a site similar to google graveyard for all these AI+X products that OAI and ANT are throwing out.