Fable was amazing during the first preview. Once they added it back, the limits are too low to get anything done. I might use it in chat if I remember to select it once a month but don’t even bother to try and code with it.
Interesting - I would never use it as I find entering math with plain ASCII much faster and more intuitive, but if there is interest in this, I'll increase its priority!
ASCII entry is great if you already know exactly what you're doing. There's no built-in tooling to help you convert your intent to ASCII. You have to be confident that your entry accurately represents what you intended, since the input isn't typeset in the output either. And you have to be comfortable doing the translation in your head as you go back and forth across your work, fast enough that it doesn't get in the way of reading your own notebook.
A lot of what makes Mathematica notebooks valuable is that they're readable. I can't read a Woxi Studio notebook, I can only re-parse it. It seems that mathematical expressions included in text don't render in Woxi Studio either so it isn't possible to read notebooks that include math content. The ASCII position is completely reasonable for Woxi as a language; it just falls short of what Mathematica notebooks do for me.
I'm really impressed with everything else. Functions, plotting, solves — the tool works, is really fast and I'm super impressed. I might reach for your browser playground going forward. This is the type of software that makes me glad open source exists.
SpaceX made fast index inclusion a condition of where it listed. Nasdaq changed its index rules so that instead of having to wait months to a year, SpaceX can enter an index after 15 trading days.
Index funds track an index mechanically. If you run an S&P 500 fund, you have to mirror the S&P 500. If a company gets added to the index, every fund tracking the index must buy it to match the index -- there is no discretion. Pension funds hold a lot of index funds.
So the causal chain is that pension funds track indexes, indexes have to buy the companies in the index, SpaceX got a fast path to the indexes. SpaceX will launch and pension funds will buy the stock, presumably propping up the stock price.
It would take a lot for pension funds to undo this and would be the opposite of index investing.
And to try and expand on why an index would include a waiting period in it's rules, my limited understanding is it's to give the public markets time to follow the company and review several quarters of financial results to stabilize the valuation in relation to those results before getting included in the index.
By bypassing the rules this way they are making people doubt the security of index funds, which would damage the market just by association. Anyone who cared about the stability of these instruments would categorically deny such a request. It seems to say a lot about the market makers in general that this is being allowed.
In an alternate set of universes, Ruby has Python's current position, and you are wondering why Python didn't take off. (But I suspect Ruby evolved fairly differently in those cases.) The universes where both are popular are much rarer.
I wish them the best, but I think they would have been best not drawing the comparison to Salesforce. IME people buy Salesforce not for the CRM but for the force.com platform. The ability to seamlessly build business logic over the entire flow of a business is Salesforce's bread and butter. CRM is a small part that definitely gets heavy use, but it's only a small part of the larger picture.
If they had a way to quickly spin of LOB apps like Salesforce does, and had implemented a CRM on top of that... I'd say they would be much more apt drawing the comparison. Particularly if that doesn't require code to do. I know a LOT of companies that would pay dearly for such a hosted platform, GPL or not.
It's probably wise as a startup to not go for Salesforce parity while building out the core roadmap. You can build a decent business catching new companies and paying attention to their needs unencumbered by the expectations of "switchers".
I agree with your points about what people want / expect from Salesforce. Would kind of be cool to see a CRM have AppExchange + SF data model interoperability.
I'm not a fan of Elon-style "pitch FSD or promise things that you don't have" either. But we had to find the right balance between expressing our vision and expressing where we are which you can see through screenshots/product demos.
The vision is definitely to have something extensible and more powerful than force.com ; we aren't there yet because we need to build strong foundations before that. We already try to separate our business apps from the core engine in the code base to learn what will be the right api and get ready for that next step when it's time.
If that's the case I'd encourage you to take away a few lessons from Salesforce:
1. IT is not your customer. The business is, and they don't know how to write code. Based on what I saw thus far; this is your biggest weakness. The only way to extend the platform at the moment is to self-host and write code.
2. Avoid baking crazy logic into the system now that you'll be unable to fix later *cough* SF 'standard' objects *cough* that will behave in very weird ways.
2(a). Person Accounts look like a good idea. But, they aren't; and never will be. They just create a lot of complications later when someone gets married or starts a business.
If they had a way to quickly spin of LOB apps like Salesforce does, and had implemented a CRM on top of that... I'd say they would be much more apt drawing the comparison. Particularly if that doesn't require code to do. I know a LOT of companies that would pay dearly for such a hosted platform, GPL or not.
I'm curious. What would you use for that today? MS Dynamics? Airtable? Budibase? Appsmith?
After trying out a bunch of tools, I found Appsmith worked best for me but for some cases I had to move on to Windmill (which is not exactly low-code but can be)
I absolutely love Windmill. The ability to stitch scripts together into workflows is great.
100%. You also buy Salesforce because your salespeople demand you too. It's something users are familiar with and excel in. Dislodging an incumbent is a lot more than just the technical product itself.
Twenty would be better served not marketing itself as an alternative as it isn't really an alternative. Instead, focus on their strengths and hone it on a niche audience. Useful guide by April Dunford, who's a guru at positioning (and coincidentally had repositioned a CRM tool previously!): https://www.aprildunford.com/post/a-quickstart-guide-to-posi....
What's ironic about ecosystems is that (as an integration developer), getting devs to build on your platform is so easy if companies would just help them connect to users to better understand their needs, and then give them the necessary endpoints.
I, and many others, would jump to build on basically any tool that facilitated those relationships.
Yeah IMO its a red flag to compare yourself to Salesforce unless you:
* Offer a managed database system that can support common ETL workloads, custom fields, event hooks like post-save, etc
* A embeded-DSL for scripting custom actions, no an API does not replace this functionality
* Consultants/Support-engineering/and other escape valves when a really important business process needs to get fixed or built NOW
* A lot more
And frankly many startups don't have the muscle for this. Its not easy to do database work and its not easy to create functional (not necessarily good, just functional) DSLs and programming languages. These are harder computer science problems that take real talent to solve well. There are valid reasons Salesforce has the market cap it does.
