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.
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.
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 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.
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
> 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'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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 autogenerated 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
Figma is the default for teams but is losing a lot of stickiness.
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.
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 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.
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.
Why does it show that? Maybe they have tens of billions of dollars and the bandwidth to do more.
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.
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.
These seem like natural extensions that I'm sure will be very useful.
Nobody is replacing excel anywhere.
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 autogenerated 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.