I have a different approach to the industry when it comes to work documents.
I'm building https://smalldocs.org / https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs. My take is that the siloed approach of previous document formats is now redundant. The document formats were isolated because we needed heavy tools for humans to do the work. Now we need lightweight javascript predominately for rending as agents do the work, so document formats can be blended.
This means SmallDocs allows an agent to put together a document (the underlying format is markdown with rich custom rendering on top) with text, diagrams, a multi tab spreadsheet, charts, code, slides, etc.
When Anthropic released "claude design" people were telling that figma is dead now, but in fact claude design didn't move forward and stayed as a "fallback tool" when you quickly need to check / edit something. And for the serious work you still go to Figma and other designer tools.
I have a feeling that Whiteboards, Sheets, Docs and so on will be the same - it's a nicer way to present artefacts, discuss them and maybe make notes, but for the proper editor experience you'll go to the tools which were designed for these things. And I'm not saying that Claude Something tools are bad, they're just overly simplified and limited, probably on purpose.
You're right but I do feel like this is more of a case of different paradigms being a slow burn rather than a failure.
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.
I agree, these new products (the same as claude design) is a base on which they'll be probably building new experiences and use cases, so long-term it will get much more integrated into daily live, especially for quick and easy tasks
Claude design was good and it only gets better at design. For solo projects, it’s much better. They’re moving it from standalone to being fully integrated.
Figma is the default for teams but is losing a lot of stickiness.
I agree on solo projects, I actually use claude design as a viewer to see what my agents built or for quick and dirty prototypes, the design work itself happens in claude code. So to me "claude design" as a product doesn't really click, although I agree it's useful for many many people. In my case I'm just not an experience designer to learn Figma from scratch so claude design covers that part, but I saw how cool UX designers were still choosing Figma
I'm really happy with what Claude can do with Reladraw. No longer are objects colliding on the drawing (see Mermaid, draw.io). The artifacts that Claude can create off of "lighter" tools will make me go there 80% of the time, Figma and other "heavies" can stay in the 20%. More like 90/10 actually.
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.
Mermaid is an automatic layout tool. Reladraw has language where instead of letting an algorithm completely randomize your layout, you declare where items go using relative terms, such as below, right of, level with, or gaps (relative placement). The natural language is good for the LLM.
> When Anthropic released "claude design" people were telling that figma is dead now, but in fact claude design didn't move forward and stayed as a "fallback tool" when you quickly need to check / edit something.
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 think its shortsighted tbh.
The advances are crazy. One will just release another claude design later and before you know it, it'll just be super figma.
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.
Once you understand how far you can push it, Claude Design is an incredible tool - my personal favorite ai-related thing of the year. Of course it's piggybacking off all the model advancements which has made it increasingly capable.
I thought Figma would recover once they finally do something with Payload CMS since they acquired them long time ago. And only now I found that they did (https://www.figma.com/blog/websites-with-payload-in-figma/) and it doesn't look good :/ I was expecting much more
As a traditional company, if I had invested with a large team to build out these three tools. I wouldn't launch it with a short blog post. It shows how serious they are at maintaining them. People forget there are entire teams/companies supporting SaaS products. Not just the engineers that built them.
Vertical integration was always in the cards, unfortunately.
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.
It just shows that they hired a lot of productive people and gave them a lot of autonomy. Google went through a protracted period of this, culminating in the "more wood behind fewer arrows" mandate in 2011 where they decided to shutter stagnating, abandoned, or distraction efforts.
I expect that Anthropic will have success in some of their side hustles if they're reinforced by the model ecosystem and double down on them, but you should also expect that at some point in the future we will talk about the "Anthropic Graveyard".
> Working with Claude on a project often meant moving the output over to another tool or program, where Claude didn’t have live access to follow progress and changes. Now, your documents, boards, sheets, and dashboards can stay in Claude, with access for your team to continue editing together.
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.
That's the goal. They're desperately trying to make their platform 'sticky'. I see OpenAI using similar tactics with Spaces and Dots.
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.
I mean, I don't think it's that different from the current reality of businesses just picking Microsoft or Google as their one-stop-shop for business software. There will actually be more competition now, as Anthropic and OpenAI will be added to the mix.
The playbook Anthropic is following with integrating everything innto their platform is the same playbook that enabled Microsoft, Google, Baidu, Amazon, Apple, etc al to get and stay where they are.
>How does this work long-term? Is the new reality going to be picking an AI provider for all of your SaSS tooling,
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.
Competition will thrive as it always does, wouldn’t worry about that. In this case I view Claude as more of the competitor here. Ever try using Co-pilot in Microsoft Office?
“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.
I don't know, I feel like it's nice to have most of these things built into claude desktop as a quick way for Claude to mock up or show me what the data looks like but ultimately want to use my specialized app for the work anyway. If anything, its the ultimate combination - show me the work quickly here first, then port it to the final state inside Excel, Powerpoing, Figma, whatever.
For now. I think they are slowly getting to the point where their models are powerful enough that they feel they can compete with everyone in everything.
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.
Apple created IWork: Pages, Numbers, Keynote. Google created Workspaces with Docs, Sheets, Slides. Open source options like LibreOffice and OpenOffice exist. Google is the only one that has managed to take any significant market share from Microsoft. I don't think Anthropic has the focus to follow it through.
I don’t understand the need for these side quests. Microsoft has a 40 year lead in spreadsheets. You are not going to dethrone them no matter how good your AI’s code is. And no one is asking you for an excel competitor. Fixing the million problems in existing products that users have already raised (aka the boring work) is a much better use of resources.
I don't see them as side quests but rather as a complement to what they offer.
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.
Tell that to google sheets or google docs?? At some point you want to easily interoperate with a document or spreadsheet artifact. There aren't great drop in solutions while keeping everything within managed context. Compiling to and from docx or xls files don't make sense. It makes the most sense to spin up your own. What do you expect them to do instead?
I've seen large enterprise customers who adopt GSuite but still have a few thousand Excel licenses because the people who need certain Excel features, just need them. Average user might find Claude Sheets is enough, but it won't replace Excel everywhere anytime soon.
> You are not going to dethrone them no matter how good your AI’s code is.
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.
> When you’re done brainstorming, Claude can turn the board into a doc or deck, or bring it into tools like Lucid, Miro, or Vani by Zoho, where you can continue working on it with your team.
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
Man, I really hope that Google doesn't see this and decide to start scraping their suite to train Gemini. As it stands, anything not explicitly marked as public isn't scraped so there's that modicum of peace but I'll have to start exclusively using Euro-Office/LibreOffice if this gets more traction and Google decides to make the switch.
I really don't get why you would launch this instead of doubling down on your strengths, which are coding and cybersecurity models. Possibly at a better price point than your competitors.
Lock in: make the product have enough features and user only network effects that companies have to get everyone a Claude seat and sign up for enterprise.
The one thing I do really like about Claude / Anthropic is that Claude.ai docs (especially its ability to create HTML docs) seems substantially better than Gemini or ChatGPT.
These seem like natural extensions that I'm sure will be very useful.
Claude data is a huge move, much bigger than the other two (even if they end up with more users).
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.
And what company is going to hand over all their data to Anthropic without proper controls, regulatory compliance, sovereignty rules and customer managed encryption and isolation? Could it happen, yes. Will it happen quickly, no.
This isn’t true. Today we needed to build a model for our startup to forecast headcount. Usually I’d use excel. Instead Claude built an app for me. More powerful features in a fraction of the time.
You built an "app" though - you could have done that with the model du jour, right?
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.
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.
They run on excel today. They will run on code in the future. Excel was a way for normies to write code with all the limitations that came with it. Now normies can just write the code.
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?
My experience is that a lot of former Excel use cases have been completely subsumed by Claude/LLMs. Excel files may risk becoming just an interchange format.
I did my first claude slides presentation. I don't see myself voluntarily loading up PowerPoint again.
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.
Honestly, Excel seems easier to me, with the caveat that Excel serves two purposes.
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.
Yep, just need Claude Mail (Cmail, anyone?) and Cluade Docs and you have a strong competitor to Google Workspaces. I'd consider using Cmail to start getting out of googles ad ecosystem.
I see they're desperate to lock people and their data into these applications for when the open weights models undercut their main business. Not sure it'll justify the ridiculous valuation, but they need to try something.
I don't think they have a proven history of abandoning projects yet. Why would they when the tools they build (agents) can dramatically reduce the costs of maintaining and improving projects?
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.
So LLM provider want to become all-encompasing app/data suite providers. But really this would just shift your data/money from one paid walled garden (Google/Micro$/Adope) into another: so only a lateral move.
The better solution would be a uniform 'App Suite of the commons' (open-source) with a plugable/switchable data and inference providers.
"better" as in better for the customer, not better for Anthropic :)
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.
The need a reporting and analytics offering (if they don't have one already). If i can tell it "ok report over this data, join it together on these fildss, bucket by that field" then review and say "no wait, filter by this other field and only show me addresses in Ohio... oh wait let the viewer choose a state and also let them choose a financial quarter. Find out our financial quarters from our website. ok add an appropriate graph to show change of field X over time" then finally "publish and notify users the report is available with a link". That would make a part of my job a lot easier.
Is that really a smart idea with respect to the IPO? Why not leave the risk and reward of building slop on top of AI to the industry?
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.
If their valuation is justified, they WILL disrupt every SaaS worth disrupting where most of the value is in the first S. There isn't enough money in selling a commodity.
Claude vendor lock-in - Claude: not thanks! I prefer you as an easily interchangeable commodity that plays an intermittent role in my broader AI strategy.
Would much rather use something open-source than something that locks my company into an AI provider. Hell, I'd rather have an AI build something that rips off these three products than get locked in.
I have a different approach to the industry when it comes to work documents.
I'm building https://smalldocs.org / https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs. My take is that the siloed approach of previous document formats is now redundant. The document formats were isolated because we needed heavy tools for humans to do the work. Now we need lightweight javascript predominately for rending as agents do the work, so document formats can be blended.
This means SmallDocs allows an agent to put together a document (the underlying format is markdown with rich custom rendering on top) with text, diagrams, a multi tab spreadsheet, charts, code, slides, etc.
Some example SmallDocs:
* AlphaFold 3: capabilities, evidence and operational limits (diagram, spreadsheets, charts, code, math): https://smalldocs.org/s/k9BtoviHg1eMsWzrSDBVZM#k=v0oIAbORXDj...
* Profitable growth can run out of cash (slides, spreadsheet, charts): https://smalldocs.org/s/nfCr0EEduLQwZAr0_v9ZR2#k=tv_BjigEYwt...
When Anthropic released "claude design" people were telling that figma is dead now, but in fact claude design didn't move forward and stayed as a "fallback tool" when you quickly need to check / edit something. And for the serious work you still go to Figma and other designer tools. I have a feeling that Whiteboards, Sheets, Docs and so on will be the same - it's a nicer way to present artefacts, discuss them and maybe make notes, but for the proper editor experience you'll go to the tools which were designed for these things. And I'm not saying that Claude Something tools are bad, they're just overly simplified and limited, probably on purpose.
You're right but I do feel like this is more of a case of different paradigms being a slow burn rather than a failure.
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.
I agree, these new products (the same as claude design) is a base on which they'll be probably building new experiences and use cases, so long-term it will get much more integrated into daily live, especially for quick and easy tasks
this is how Google docs, sheets and slides felt in comparison to MS Office when they first came out.
Initially they were adopted by customers with the simplest use cases and the products grew over time to what they are.
The next set of startups might just have a Claude sub when they are small and grow with the product
Claude design was good and it only gets better at design. For solo projects, it’s much better. They’re moving it from standalone to being fully integrated.
Figma is the default for teams but is losing a lot of stickiness.
I agree on solo projects, I actually use claude design as a viewer to see what my agents built or for quick and dirty prototypes, the design work itself happens in claude code. So to me "claude design" as a product doesn't really click, although I agree it's useful for many many people. In my case I'm just not an experience designer to learn Figma from scratch so claude design covers that part, but I saw how cool UX designers were still choosing Figma
Claude Design is a great idea but a terrible product. Claude Design may not kill figma but "something like claude design" probably will.
I'm really happy with what Claude can do with Reladraw. No longer are objects colliding on the drawing (see Mermaid, draw.io). The artifacts that Claude can create off of "lighter" tools will make me go there 80% of the time, Figma and other "heavies" can stay in the 20%. More like 90/10 actually.
> objects colliding on the drawing
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.
Mermaid is an automatic layout tool. Reladraw has language where instead of letting an algorithm completely randomize your layout, you declare where items go using relative terms, such as below, right of, level with, or gaps (relative placement). The natural language is good for the LLM.
> When Anthropic released "claude design" people were telling that figma is dead now, but in fact claude design didn't move forward and stayed as a "fallback tool" when you quickly need to check / edit something.
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 think its shortsighted tbh. The advances are crazy. One will just release another claude design later and before you know it, it'll just be super figma.
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.
I wouldn't take any "X is dead" as more than just momentarily hype, we should get used to it now that it's been happening for years.
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.
Once you understand how far you can push it, Claude Design is an incredible tool - my personal favorite ai-related thing of the year. Of course it's piggybacking off all the model advancements which has made it increasingly capable.
True, but still waiting for Figma stock recovery :(
I thought Figma would recover once they finally do something with Payload CMS since they acquired them long time ago. And only now I found that they did (https://www.figma.com/blog/websites-with-payload-in-figma/) and it doesn't look good :/ I was expecting much more
Figma is trading lower now than it did when Claude Design was released with a total stock drop of 56.38% from Nov 10, 2025 to Nov 10, 2026.
So yes, not dead and clearly good for people who want that additional layer of control, but also nowhere where it used to be.
These products have already failed.
As a traditional company, if I had invested with a large team to build out these three tools. I wouldn't launch it with a short blog post. It shows how serious they are at maintaining them. People forget there are entire teams/companies supporting SaaS products. Not just the engineers that built them.
Model companies are starting to cannibalize their api customers's business cases. Shows that the regular avenues of revenue growth are slowing down
Vertical integration was always in the cards, unfortunately.
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.
It just shows that they hired a lot of productive people and gave them a lot of autonomy. Google went through a protracted period of this, culminating in the "more wood behind fewer arrows" mandate in 2011 where they decided to shutter stagnating, abandoned, or distraction efforts.
I expect that Anthropic will have success in some of their side hustles if they're reinforced by the model ecosystem and double down on them, but you should also expect that at some point in the future we will talk about the "Anthropic Graveyard".
> Shows that the regular avenues of revenue growth are slowing down
Why does it show that? Maybe they have tens of billions of dollars and the bandwidth to do more.
The revenue growth dropped from 100+% QoQ to only 60% QoQ, they're dying! /s
Which will cause customers to leave. Good thing I just bought a fresh batch of popcorn from Costco.
Bring in Claude Mail and calendar.. then it’s going to be very interesting..
> Working with Claude on a project often meant moving the output over to another tool or program, where Claude didn’t have live access to follow progress and changes. Now, your documents, boards, sheets, and dashboards can stay in Claude, with access for your team to continue editing together.
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.
That's the goal. They're desperately trying to make their platform 'sticky'. I see OpenAI using similar tactics with Spaces and Dots.
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.
> I read this as: We'll build anything and everything into Claude eventually.
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 mean, I don't think it's that different from the current reality of businesses just picking Microsoft or Google as their one-stop-shop for business software. There will actually be more competition now, as Anthropic and OpenAI will be added to the mix.
The playbook Anthropic is following with integrating everything innto their platform is the same playbook that enabled Microsoft, Google, Baidu, Amazon, Apple, etc al to get and stay where they are.
>How does this work long-term? Is the new reality going to be picking an AI provider for all of your SaSS tooling,
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.
Claude becomes a no-code platform with all the same shortcomings they have.
The rest of the world moves on using LLMs as tools.
Anthropic is eventually bought and stripped for parts.
Competition will thrive as it always does, wouldn’t worry about that. In this case I view Claude as more of the competitor here. Ever try using Co-pilot in Microsoft Office?
“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.
I don't know, I feel like it's nice to have most of these things built into claude desktop as a quick way for Claude to mock up or show me what the data looks like but ultimately want to use my specialized app for the work anyway. If anything, its the ultimate combination - show me the work quickly here first, then port it to the final state inside Excel, Powerpoing, Figma, whatever.
For now. I think they are slowly getting to the point where their models are powerful enough that they feel they can compete with everyone in everything.
Ironically, I am using Claude to help write https://omasheet.org
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.
Apple created IWork: Pages, Numbers, Keynote. Google created Workspaces with Docs, Sheets, Slides. Open source options like LibreOffice and OpenOffice exist. Google is the only one that has managed to take any significant market share from Microsoft. I don't think Anthropic has the focus to follow it through.
I don’t understand the need for these side quests. Microsoft has a 40 year lead in spreadsheets. You are not going to dethrone them no matter how good your AI’s code is. And no one is asking you for an excel competitor. Fixing the million problems in existing products that users have already raised (aka the boring work) is a much better use of resources.
When Google Docs were out, Microsoft already had a 20-year lead. So shouldn't have they made Google Doc?
And the story repeats. Google had a 20-year lead in search and LLM definitely has threatened it.
They are building a walled garden platform the same way Apple and Microsoft does. This isn't at all a surprising move.
I don't see them as side quests but rather as a complement to what they offer.
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.
It's a desperation move. They're listing because they're out of runway, they're trying to extend the runway.
Tell that to google sheets or google docs?? At some point you want to easily interoperate with a document or spreadsheet artifact. There aren't great drop in solutions while keeping everything within managed context. Compiling to and from docx or xls files don't make sense. It makes the most sense to spin up your own. What do you expect them to do instead?
I've seen large enterprise customers who adopt GSuite but still have a few thousand Excel licenses because the people who need certain Excel features, just need them. Average user might find Claude Sheets is enough, but it won't replace Excel everywhere anytime soon.
I've not really seen anyone using sheets for serious number crunching tbh. It does cover 90% of use cases though.
40 year lead in bloat and legacy cruft maybe
> You are not going to dethrone them no matter how good your AI’s code is.
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.
> When you’re done brainstorming, Claude can turn the board into a doc or deck, or bring it into tools like Lucid, Miro, or Vani by Zoho, where you can continue working on it with your team.
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
> When you’re done brainstorming ... where you can continue working on it with your team.
Yeah, if we're done working on it, why are we continuing to work on it? That makes no sense.
This is kind of weird.
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.
Less context switching for current workers. For new ones, they might not need those other accounts in the future.
And why share data when you can own it?
Man, I really hope that Google doesn't see this and decide to start scraping their suite to train Gemini. As it stands, anything not explicitly marked as public isn't scraped so there's that modicum of peace but I'll have to start exclusively using Euro-Office/LibreOffice if this gets more traction and Google decides to make the switch.
I really don't get why you would launch this instead of doubling down on your strengths, which are coding and cybersecurity models. Possibly at a better price point than your competitors.
Lock in: make the product have enough features and user only network effects that companies have to get everyone a Claude seat and sign up for enterprise.
The one thing I do really like about Claude / Anthropic is that Claude.ai docs (especially its ability to create HTML docs) seems substantially better than Gemini or ChatGPT.
These seem like natural extensions that I'm sure will be very useful.
Claude data is a huge move, much bigger than the other two (even if they end up with more users).
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.
This is a bonkers take. No company is going to migrate and reconnect their data to Claude.
And what company is going to hand over all their data to Anthropic without proper controls, regulatory compliance, sovereignty rules and customer managed encryption and isolation? Could it happen, yes. Will it happen quickly, no.
Claude Code is already being used by tons of large companies. I'm sure they will figure out how to do it pretty quickly.
Just like how no company is going to send their whole repo of source code to Claude Code. Right? Right...?
Lol, not it's not.
No company that need that level of data ingest and analysis is using Anthropic's tooling over something that is used industry wide.
Unless Microsoft and Google get their butts into gear, Claude is going to become the basis for running a business and disrupt Office and Workspace.
Are they? Still seems way more convenient to just connect Claude to whatever people are already running.
Nobody is replacing excel anywhere.
This isn’t true. Today we needed to build a model for our startup to forecast headcount. Usually I’d use excel. Instead Claude built an app for me. More powerful features in a fraction of the time.
You built an "app" though - you could have done that with the model du jour, right?
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.
You're a single person in a startup.
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.
They run on excel today. They will run on code in the future. Excel was a way for normies to write code with all the limitations that came with it. Now normies can just write the code.
I used to work as a trader for a major investment bank. Everything was excel. I can’t see it staying that way.
> Now normies can just write the code.
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?
My experience is that a lot of former Excel use cases have been completely subsumed by Claude/LLMs. Excel files may risk becoming just an interchange format.
I did my first claude slides presentation. I don't see myself voluntarily loading up PowerPoint again.
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.
Honestly, Excel seems easier to me, with the caveat that Excel serves two purposes.
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.
Nadella already said that they expect to have more revenue from agents than from humans.
They are shifting to building stuff for agents, not for humans.
Ironically, Claude is building stuff for humans :)
Yep, just need Claude Mail (Cmail, anyone?) and Cluade Docs and you have a strong competitor to Google Workspaces. I'd consider using Cmail to start getting out of googles ad ecosystem.
and… into anthropic’s instead??
You mean like slack did?
Claude? no.
Omarchy? yep.
I see they're desperate to lock people and their data into these applications for when the open weights models undercut their main business. Not sure it'll justify the ridiculous valuation, but they need to try something.
Watch them abandon these projects after 6 months.
I don't think they have a proven history of abandoning projects yet. Why would they when the tools they build (agents) can dramatically reduce the costs of maintaining and improving projects?
They don't have a history. Period.
And I'd argue they sort of abandoned MCP. Claude's support for it is poor.
They'll just ignore any user complaints about them being broken or expensive. Anthropic support is bad.
Did somebody say vendor lock-in?
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.
Good to see them go after the big players
Let's get Claude office, Claude auth, Claude notebooks.... maybe call it C Suite.
Nice name :)
So LLM provider want to become all-encompasing app/data suite providers. But really this would just shift your data/money from one paid walled garden (Google/Micro$/Adope) into another: so only a lateral move.
The better solution would be a uniform 'App Suite of the commons' (open-source) with a plugable/switchable data and inference providers.
"better" as in better for the customer, not better for Anthropic :)
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.
Claude365
ClaudeCloudServices
ClaudeERP
ClaudeCRM
ClaudeNeuralLink
ClaudeConsciousnessUpload
Nice to see this is also on Teams and Enterprise, naturally.
CLAUDE(/openAI) Everything soon - at least before the IPO.
The need a reporting and analytics offering (if they don't have one already). If i can tell it "ok report over this data, join it together on these fildss, bucket by that field" then review and say "no wait, filter by this other field and only show me addresses in Ohio... oh wait let the viewer choose a state and also let them choose a financial quarter. Find out our financial quarters from our website. ok add an appropriate graph to show change of field X over time" then finally "publish and notify users the report is available with a link". That would make a part of my job a lot easier.
Spreadsheets are becoming standard UX elements like text boxes...
Is that really a smart idea with respect to the IPO? Why not leave the risk and reward of building slop on top of AI to the industry?
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.
If their valuation is justified, they WILL disrupt every SaaS worth disrupting where most of the value is in the first S. There isn't enough money in selling a commodity.
Claude vendor lock-in - Claude: not thanks! I prefer you as an easily interchangeable commodity that plays an intermittent role in my broader AI strategy.
Would much rather use something open-source than something that locks my company into an AI provider. Hell, I'd rather have an AI build something that rips off these three products than get locked in.
RIP Gsuite.
ugh, another thing that no one is going to use.
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.
Anthropic is playing in Alphabet's field