I once worked with a group of people where using cool new webapps was all the rage, and I can’t stand it.
Loom? Miro?? Jira? Figma?? Nearby? Around? Veed?!??!? Yes, these are all real, and yes, none of them do anything new, beyond having a nice domain name and logo. Yet, they do expect you to make a business account and pay for their premium features on a monthly basis.
Remember IRC? MSN Messenger? Well, now you can have the same thing, but slower, and in your browser, if you pay for Meet, Around, Whereby, Teams, Slack, Zoom or Appear (One of these isn’t real). Video chat was solved 30 years ago. Putting it in the browser, and masking the webcam feeds to be circular is not a value-add, and is definitely not worth $15.97 a month.
Remember screen recording? Now you can have that for $12.50 a month per “creator”, but slower, and inside your browser, and with a version that doesn’t just give you a video file you can share. It gives you a link to a website, where there is a video file that other people might be allowed to access, as long as the servers are up, and they like having JavaScript enabled in their browser. Oh, and it’s been nouned, so what you have made is not called something confusing like “a video”. What you have made is of course called: “a loom”.
You know video editing, right? Now you can have that for $12 a month, but slower, and in your browser, and with restrictions like “up to 720 minutes of subtitles per year”, “Up to 1080p quality” and “up to 25 minute-long videos”, if you pay for Veed! For that price, they’ll even remove the ugly watermark they slap on top of your videos! And if that isn’t enough for you, you can subscribe to the Pro option for $24 a month, where you get 1440 minutes of subtitles per year! Wow! And if you pay us $59 a month, you’ll even get to export in 4K!
I am dead fucking serious. You don’t pay them to solve any real problems, you pay them extra to remove their own arbitrary resolution limits and watermark. This is a real company, and this is their real product in the year of our lord, current year.
Remember taking notes? Well, with Miro you can have that for as low as $8/mo.! But slower, and in your browser, requiring WebGL, with everything placed in virtual Post-Its, and with insanely annoying access policies that can be set per user account that you have to register to get access.
Oh, I forgot to mention! All these services need you to make an account with your email. They have EULAs, ToS, and privacy policies that you definitely will read very carefully. These companies and their data will definitely never get sold to another company with a shady past. That never happens. Not to mention, your employees will simply love making accounts on all these platforms! They’ll love all the emails they’ll get about “tips” on how to use the latest features!
Remember GitHub issues, and having a TODO list? That has a mediocre webapp replacement too! Jira! Now you can track your GitHub issues… on another website! Great. Don’t you feel productive?
In fact, that’s what all these services are about; feeling productive. They don’t assist you in doing anything at all. If you want to be productive, produce product. Go create. Do the work. Ship.
Take a Miro brainstorming session, for instance: Having everyone’s cursors show up on screen is just distracting. As is seeing everyone else throwing sticky notes around and accidentally occupying one another’s space. This gives a feeling of intensity, of busyness, of doing something! Despite probably being less focused on the ideas you are putting down, due to having to think about the location, scale and paper color of these ideas in a limited 2D space shared with others. Now that you have to juggle all these things, you feel like you’re doing more, which you are! Issue is, you’re doing less of the actual task.
I was going to find out how to do a specific thing in our Unity project. There was apparently an article about this on Notion, but in that Notion article, they decided to make graphs of the information with some embedded Miro boards. Because how cool isn’t it that Notion is actually just Chromium, so we can embed anything we want!? However I’m not signed in to Miro… inside Notion. So, I can’t see any of that information, and the login button just pops open my real browser.
Despite all of this seeming completely bass ackwards in the most obvious of ways, people still fall for it. They still pay for it. With the Netflix logo tattooed on their forehead and Coka-Cola on their cheek, they go around enthusiastically calling it “a loom”, while scoping out more funnels to fall into.
Using this stuff is a massive NGMI-signal. The people that don’t get swept up in any of this garbage are of a higher ilk. I have been blessed with a great circle of such shipper-friends, and encourage anyone wanting to actually achieve something to seek out the same thing.