Claude Whiteboards, Claude Sheets, and Claude Data

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.

Model companies are starting to cannibalize their api customers's business cases. Shows that the regular avenues of revenue growth are slowing down

&gt; 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.<p>I read this as: We&#x27;ll build anything and everything into Claude eventually.<p>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.

If you can have any app at the snap of your fingers, you will have them all<p>I really don&#x27;t understand why people can&#x27;t see the future, in ten years the speed at which AI will create apps will be astonishing. Any app, ask and get it done instantly. So if one provider (your AI provider) has them all why would you go around looking for the same thing if you already have them in one place?<p>I use DeepSeek because Claude never allowed me to play with it (living in Venezuela), but I know people that started with Claude just use it everyday and by inertia they won&#x27;t switch, no reason at all. Just ask Claude for anything and it will deliver. Same for any AI. Retention is the key word, tools, apps, services, plugins, libraries, all in one place, everything.<p>AI is the new OS, the new browser, the new marketplace

I have a different approach to the industry when it comes to work documents.<p>I&#x27;m building <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smalldocs.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smalldocs.org</a> &#x2F; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;espressoplease&#x2F;smalldocs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;espressoplease&#x2F;smalldocs</a>. 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.<p>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.<p>Some example SmallDocs:<p>* AlphaFold 3: capabilities, evidence and operational limits (diagram, spreadsheets, charts, code, math): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smalldocs.org&#x2F;s&#x2F;k9BtoviHg1eMsWzrSDBVZM#k=v0oIAbORXDjpXjTQsLBP3DW3JS5Rw-s0GEVlZbS_W_w" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smalldocs.org&#x2F;s&#x2F;k9BtoviHg1eMsWzrSDBVZM#k=v0oIAbORXDj...</a><p>* Profitable growth can run out of cash (slides, spreadsheet, charts): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smalldocs.org&#x2F;s&#x2F;nfCr0EEduLQwZAr0_v9ZR2#k=tv_BjigEYwt02icp7O5iovQYw-cmVWCMRmc7qXOnaU4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smalldocs.org&#x2F;s&#x2F;nfCr0EEduLQwZAr0_v9ZR2#k=tv_BjigEYwt...</a>

There is a big problem with how we work with ai-generated artifacts, but I don&#x27;t think creating another google-docs-like suite is the answer. LLMs are very good at working with Markdown, and are way worse with xml-based rich documents. The problem is, we have established collaborative rich docs, but no collaborative markdown-based docs. For example at google, all your system design docs will end up being written in google docs, because it can be easily shared with granular access, people can leave comments, it&#x27;s well integrated with other google products. But once your doc is in that complicated format, there&#x27;s no way to iterate on that with an agent: it&#x27;s gonna inevitably destroy your formating, overwrite some of your edited content, and you can&#x27;t even have a nice line by line diff like you&#x27;d have when you work with a simple text format like md. Building a nice collaborative markdown editor to the level where it competes with gdoc in popularity, at least in software engineering circle, would be the answer. Same with sheets. Some stripped version, which is as close as just &quot;csv editor with some better visuals&quot; would be much more ai-friendly

Smart move for Anthropic. They&#x27;ve embedded into businesses and are now aiming at being the Google Workspace equivalent.<p>Next step, domains and email?<p>Also this differs from Claude design imo - which was too token heavy and not easy enough for a human to manipulate without prompting. Here, the human and agent user have a similar level of control.

Although Claude could build your anything-app or host your design, Anthropic must solve some trust problems. Ppl still use alternative software because running a business or permanently hosting your backlog on an artifact that someone one-shot prompt build in 20 mins is scary. Do you trust that this artifact link will be stable and reliable for an IRS audit or could a disgruntled employee edit it to hurt the company? What was in their claude.md when they built it?

I guess this is what&#x27;s supposed to be their moat: Owning your data. Not a bad idea. Yes, you could prompt these tools into being yourself, but once all of the org&#x27;s data lives in Claude because &quot;we already pay for the license&quot; it&#x27;ll be hard to switch model provider.

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&#x27;t think Anthropic has the focus to follow it through.

I don&#x27;t know, I feel like it&#x27;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.

These products have already failed.<p>As a traditional company, if I had invested with a large team to build out these three tools. I wouldn&#x27;t launch it with a short blog post. It shows how serious they are at maintaining them. People forget there are entire teams&#x2F;companies supporting SaaS products. Not just the engineers that built them.

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.

A challenger doesn&#x27;t necessarily win by doing the incumbent&#x27;s job better. It wins by making the incumbent&#x27;s job irrelevant.

The interesting part is that anyone can create these productivity apps now; all that Anthropic has that others don&#x27;t is the model moat. Namely, people can access models cheaper in Claude.ai compared to paying API prices for other people&#x27;s tools, and Anthropic&#x27;s tools come bundled with the discounted model access itself.<p>In other words they&#x27;re able to create an entire ecosystem around this cost advantage and there&#x27;s very little others (without their own models with higher cost-performance than public ones) can do about it.

Every time I see an LLM company release tools to compete with existing tool suites it feels like they&#x27;re just proving we can all now build these quickly ourselves. At least a software engineer could.<p>Build vs buy keeps getting pushed further to build, which is great for people in general but it feels like Anthropic is digging its own grave proving the only value it can provide is the model itself, and from what it looks like that&#x27;s still scaling linearly and unprofitably.

I use artifacts extensively in my work. I use spreadsheets only occasionally at work. Even when using them, the focus was on sharing information through tables rather than complex functions. That was already half a year ago. These days, it&#x27;s more common to just create them as artifacts and share them. Now that the spreadsheet is in the artifact, it should be easy to find the Claude artifact’s spreadsheet whenever you need it. I don&#x27;t think it will expand to Google or MS Spreadsheets.<p>We must consider that if tools with these basic features continue to be created, people will gradually start using them, eventually leading to a dependency on specific tools.<p>That ecosystem is expected to grow substantially.

&gt; 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.<p>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

Claude data is a huge move, much bigger than the other two (even if they end up with more users).<p>All Anthropic needs is to host an S3 clone and they become the default place to put all your company&#x27;s data because they are the easiest place to analyze the data.

Bring in Claude Mail and calendar.. then it’s going to be very interesting..

What this is long-term is a strategy to pull corporate customers out of existing incumbents and move them into a more efficient, easier system. Humans always want an advantage, which is speed and ease.<p>But the trade-off is a move from a bundled cloud service that is currently unlimited use into a new method of token-based content generation, which can be more expensive via API.<p>It appears to be a business model made directly from the 2000&#x27;s with expensive mobile phone data charges and overages.

I&#x27;m just trying to wrap my head around using claude whiteboard as a brainstorming tool like Mural or Miro. Would claude be invited to be provide it&#x27;s ideas or review ideas provided by the rest of the team?

Ironically, I am using Claude to help write <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;omasheet.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;omasheet.org</a><p>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.<p>Feedback - good and bad very welcome.

I wonder how big the team size was that shipped whiteboards specifically, it seems like everyone is making whiteboards these days

I think the larger play here, both by Anthropic and OpenAI, is how quickly can they become the place of work. Maybe today these products look very basic, but I feel it&#x27;s part of a larger strategic play for model companies to become office&#x2F;work suite companies where said suite is powered by their models.

Man, I really hope that Google doesn&#x27;t see this and decide to start scraping their suite to train Gemini. As it stands, anything not explicitly marked as public isn&#x27;t scraped so there&#x27;s that modicum of peace but I&#x27;ll have to start exclusively using Euro-Office&#x2F;LibreOffice if this gets more traction and Google decides to make the switch.

I read it as Claude Whistleblowers

The one thing I do really like about Claude &#x2F; Anthropic is that Claude.ai docs (especially its ability to create HTML docs) seems substantially better than Gemini or ChatGPT.<p>These seem like natural extensions that I&#x27;m sure will be very useful.

This is kind of weird.<p>Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense if they’d just let Claude connect to your Excel&#x2F;Google Sheets&#x2F;whatever?<p>Doesn’t even need an MCP or official integration at this point, if there’s computer access there’s access to everything.

Does anyone know how much work has to go into making one of these products? Are they a very thin veneer over a model? Is there actually a moat here?

I really don&#x27;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.

Watch them abandon these projects after 6 months.

Good to see them go after the big players<p>Let&#x27;s get Claude office, Claude auth, Claude notebooks.... maybe call it C Suite.

I feel like sometimes Anthropic just wants to be Google but for AI. I get the point of all this is to make the infra for agents to run on collaboratively. I agree with using AI for diverse tasks and sometimes it helps, but I feel that if we are sending &quot;my agent&quot; to work with &quot;your agent&quot; it will just create a lot of headaches for people to check

If this ends people &quot;collaborating&quot; by sending me claude design html docs via slack I&#x27;m all for it.

I wonder if they are going to be like old google and create and kill a bunch of projects just as people find them useful but they cant see how to make money from them

So LLM provider want to become all-encompasing app&#x2F;data suite providers. But really this would just shift your data&#x2F;money from one paid walled garden (Google&#x2F;Micro$&#x2F;Adope) into another: so only a lateral move.<p>The better solution would be a uniform &#x27;App Suite of the commons&#x27; (open-source) with a plugable&#x2F;switchable data and inference providers.

Claude365<p>ClaudeCloudServices<p>ClaudeERP<p>ClaudeCRM<p>ClaudeNeuralLink<p>ClaudeConsciousnessUpload

I see they&#x27;re desperate to lock people and their data into these applications for when the open weights models undercut their main business. Not sure it&#x27;ll justify the ridiculous valuation, but they need to try something.

More unlikely-to-be-sticky LLM products to throw at the nearest wall.

We aren&#x27;t getting AGI soon if all they can do is copycat existing business software. Why would they do this when superintelligence is around the corner with pay by token access to it?

Did somebody say vendor lock-in?<p>There&#x27;s a reason my co still has Slack and it ain&#x27;t because of its great features and bug-free app. It&#x27;s because every written conversation we&#x27;ve ever had is in there.

Taken straight from ClickUp&#x27;s product bundle list.

it is said that anthropic built a fully bootable os from scratch in a week, what stops them from building any other software?

Spreadsheets are becoming standard UX elements like text boxes...

I will never use this, and neither should anyone else.

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.

Coming next... Claude E-mail service.

Claude is missing an email delivery of these artifacts.

<i>Harbor is currently in a private preview under Apple’s Claris brand</i><p>Seems like they are already touting agentic development with a core of Filemaker [0]. Moof!<p>0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.claris.com&#x2F;filemaker&#x2F;agentic-development&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.claris.com&#x2F;filemaker&#x2F;agentic-development&#x2F;</a>

CLAUDE(&#x2F;openAI) Everything soon - at least before the IPO.

Nice to see this is also on Teams and Enterprise, naturally.

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?<p>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.

The need a reporting and analytics offering (if they don&#x27;t have one already). If i can tell it &quot;ok report over this data, join it together on these fildss, bucket by that field&quot; then review and say &quot;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&quot; then finally &quot;publish and notify users the report is available with a link&quot;. That would make a part of my job a lot easier.

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.

ugh, another thing that no one is going to use.<p>Their competition is offering good enough models for vastly better prices and they are making products that their customers don&#x27;t need.<p>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.

They need to make &quot;Claude Stop&quot;, making less slop tools

Would much rather use something open-source than something that locks my company into an AI provider. Hell, I&#x27;d rather have an AI build something that rips off these three products than get locked in.

RIP Gsuite.

Anthropic is playing in Alphabet&#x27;s field

more products pitched to gullible marks. at least they know their target audience