10 ms·

Microsoft's low-code strategy paints a target on UIPath and other RPA companies

215 points by tlochhead 5y ago

x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
I'll admit, I'm being a hater. But how is this different from Sun Studio of yore, Adobe Flex Designer View or anything else?
- radicalbyte 5y ago
  Sharepoint 2.0
  - _pmf_ 5y ago
    Also: Lotus Notes
bob1029 5y ago
Who has actually seen a success story with this sort of thing? We arrived at "low-code", but by way of actually solving our problem domain through many hellish iterations and figuring out what all of the various points of configuration should be. As far as I am aware, this is not something that Microsoft or any other vendor can determine for your business ahead of time. I am sure that there are a lot of types of smaller needs that can be addressed with these sorts of tools, but the big tasks of integrating multiple unique/legacy business systems together into a single logical process with its own internal state is not ever feasible with these tools. You can always get close, but its like a siren song in my experience.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- CharlesW 5y ago
  Do you consider Excel a low-code solution?
  - bob1029 5y ago
    That depends on how you use excel. Lots of formulas, et. al. would probably become easier to manage as part of a proper codebase at some point.
    - haswell 5y ago
      On the flip side, some of those spreadsheets that reach the "would be easier to manage with a proper codebase" status never would have gotten off the ground had they started as a development project.
      - bob1029 5y ago
        It really is full-circle with excel. You can start there, then wind up using it again once you realize its still an excellent data interchange mechanism.
- MangoCoffee 5y ago
  We have a Microsoft "Access app" build by a ex employee. it was used by a lot of people and now in process to be rewritten into a web app. i guess that's a success story(?). >I am sure that there are a lot of types of smaller needs that can be addressed with these sorts of tools, but the big tasks of integrating multiple unique/legacy business systems together into a single logical process with its own internal state is not ever feasible with these tools. You can always get close, but its like a siren song in my experience. i'm fine with that. when they hit a problem that no Microsoft "connector" can solve. you charge them 10x to implement a real solution.
- tyingq 5y ago
  "Who has actually seen a success story with this sort of thing?" Citizen development stuff is usually more successful than an IT department knows. They think it's failing because every time they hear about it, it's because of some mess. The thing is, they don't hear about all the stuff that works fine. There's typically a ton of MS Access, Quickbase, Excel, Google Sheets, Salesforce, etc, "apps" written and run by non-tech folks that the IT department never knows about.
  - Graffur 5y ago
    This stuff is a tactical solution that fills a gap in poor business solutions. Give it 5, 10 years and these non-IT solutions will be a nightmare for everyone involved.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  This stuff is really prevalent. I'm a programmer and I'll happily build out some low-code solution in Google Sheets or whatever. Since it takes out of the equation a whole host of potential workloads (deployment, environment maintenance, source code control, etc), these low-code solutions offer rapid deployment of prototypes. Often times, these little prototypes end up being used by 100s of people within a company. I love it because I bill out like $x0k for a few days of work. Once it's done, I pretty much never have to support it, since Google is managing that for me. Clients love it because development is done in a few days and they never seem to have to contact anyone for support. The successful ones always lead to more business. Especially with megacorps with lots of brands. Brand X will show off their new dashboard, and Brand Y wants their own version and will happily pay pretty close to the original price for basically a copy-pasta job.
- myohmy 5y ago
  Low-code has been a success in my org, because it's driven by programmers with business analyst acumen. Its not for everyone, but for the right person, it just clicks and they can sit down with a client and come up with something great in very little time. It works very, very well as a rapid prototype or MVP tool.
dnndev 5y ago
This is addressing a market. I have seen it first hand more than once. Highly driven and competent individuals that are not programmers for whatever reason and that create a monstrosity that works (using some low code solution). It’s ugly and buggy but gets a job done. This works for as long as they don’t hit a technical limitation then call devs like myself in to replace it. It was a great phase 1 and made money. They earned a project with developers. Yes it will cost more to rewrite it but the old system is still making money while the new one rolls out. At this point a low code solution makes no sense for me as a dev - believe me I have tried them. Kudos to MS.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  I think low code works for smaller more routine projects where hiring devs is just not all that feasible.
  - asdfman123 5y ago
    A lot of people stuck in places like, say, the accounting department have the soul of a dev. They like technology and want to automate things. And often times when they do that, they actually improve their departments quite a bit with stuff like VBA and Access projects (as uncool as they may seem to some). It works because "real" programming environments have learning curves that are hard to tackle if you have a day job, and even if you do tackle them, IT is probably not going to give you direct database access. I had a friend like this, who was bored as shit as an accountant. I convinced him to migrate his career to software and now he's in a data science master's program.
    - Asymmetryk 5y ago
      if I may be so bold ( and presumptuous my suggestion is of any value) I wondered if your friend would like the risk and structured securities aspects of actuarial catastrophe risk markets. This pretty much has everything in it, from chaos theory to the statistics of the cadence of liabilities upon the different kinds of financial engineering structure that are used to distribute * the liability and fund the most difficult to reinsure policies in the capital markets. edit : * and package, according to a tremendous variety of fiscal requirements and risk appetites. And naturally covering the most extreme conditions liability payments is historically a fascinating insight into how we developed our world across and binding together such tenuous links.
omk 5y ago
If this works, Microsoft is going to hit a long-term retention jackpot. Low-code ecosystems are sticky and excel in ARR as their model is usually consumption based. Moving away costs companies millions. Every employee is automating their work on this platform. I working with a consulting firm and one of our customers (+50,000 employees) has onboarded power-platform for every individual to automate their work. If ever a change is proposed, the change management team is going to shoot this down or will be forced to create a 5 year migration plan.
- akudha 5y ago
  I think it will work, especially if Microsoft can also build self hosted version of some of these tools. There is a huge market for such tools (look at how much attention self hosted Airtable alternatives are getting). Between self/cloud hosted versions, their sales machine and deep integrations, Microsoft has a huge advantage over Google and Amazon.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    At BUILD this year Microsoft announced Azure Arc which runs on any Kubernetes cluster (including ones you spin up on AWS, GCP, or a laptop on a desk somewhere) and supports running a surprising number of Azure services already (Azure App Services, Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, and supposedly growing). Administration can happen in the regular Azure Portal and it just looks like you are deploying to a custom datacenter region in the Portal. It's really slick. It's also pretty obvious that many of the services they've focused on at first are some of the underlying foundations of their Low Code efforts, so I would be surprised if Power Apps and Power BI also eventually wind up on that list of Azure Arc supported. Azure Arc seems like a really interesting "compromise" on "self-hosted" (depending of course, on which reasons you have to need "self-hosting"). (Azure also has Azure Stack which is the entirely self-hosted datacenter version too. I don't think that yet supports these Low Code tools yet either, but it's probably even closer to having the foundations for that in place.)
- jerf 5y ago
  I don't know if they're pursuing this, but Microsoft also has the opportunity to create low-code solutions that more gracefully transition into conventional solutions, because unlike a pure-low-code play, that doesn't have to mean they are losing a customer. They aren't incentivized to lock you in to low code as long as one way or another you pay Microsoft on the way out, too, via either being in the conventional Microsoft developer ecosystem or being on Azure. Given that they seems to be acquiring they way into this market, I'm sure it's nowhere near this integrated yet, but could you imagine being able to take any individual component of the system, or the system as a whole, and getting a "Click Here to create a Visual Studio Project" that completely replicates the low-code solution into Visual Studio, ready and waiting for you to start modifying it? Probably with some sort of automatic "Click Here to Deploy Your Changes Into Azure"?
syshum 5y ago
Low Code is the modern version of "Write Once run Anywhere" It is pipe dream that will cost companies millions in Vendor Lockin, rewrites, and all of the other problems that come with non-developers "developing" See the nightmare that is Excel Workbooks, the fact they are modeling FX on Excel Function is a horror I do not even want to think about
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  The relevant question, I think, is extensibility. If the low-code solution, upon hitting a wall, can be extended instead of rewritten, it's going to be a great solution for small companies to prove out ideas without the cost of general-purpose developers and custom software stacks built from general-purpose software. If any company can solve the extensibility question, I think Microsoft has a better-than-average shot at it.
- haswell 5y ago
  > will cost companies millions in Vendor Lockin, rewrites, and all of the other problems that come with non-developers "developing" What many folks miss here is that companies still willingly proceed despite these drawbacks because of the value that the end result provides. These tradeoffs are often less apparent when coming from a software development background or working for a company that builds software. But if you're in a different type of org - say financial services - these solutions are often the difference between launching a new product/capability, or putting structure around a paper process...or accomplishing absolutely nothing because development is currently tied up for the next two years. Not all companies have IT/Dev orgs that are capable of meeting the demands of the business. Some orgs are transforming their businesses (the "digital transformation" buzzword), and don't have a dev team at all. At best, they have some centralized IT department that is capable of rolling out point solutions. You might be right that these solutions are inherently inferior from a technical perspective, but if you look at this from a business outcome perspective, those tradeoffs are often worthwhile.
  - syshum 5y ago
    I agree somewhat, the problem with "business outcome perspective" likely means very short term thinking, get it done now, deal with the rest later. The people that cause the mess are not likely the ones that have to clean up the mess, people like me are. I prefer to greenfield things but instead I spend the majority of my time untangling the bad choices people made years before coming at it from a "business outcome perspective" There should be some kind of middle ground, likely starting with proper, actual training and restricting access to low code solution to people that have at least some technical literacy which often does not happen.
aparsons 5y ago
Microsoft has always had the best developer tools. This is an exciting step forward for low-code
- ajcp 5y ago
  Coming up in the time when MSFT was the "big evil" it's almost depressing to see myself now as an actual fan-boy.
  - aparsons 5y ago
    The thing is, even when they were big evil, they had the best developer tooling by a mile. Visual Studio, MSDN, etc were novel and leagues ahead of other platform providers’ equivalents
    - ffhhj 5y ago
      Visual Studio is a copy of Delphi from the 90's.
tyingq 5y ago
I would guess the RPA hype wagon will slow down on its own accord soon. The big users will start to see the downsides now that their implementations have been up a while. Scraping is brittle. And I imagine it's not experienced developers writing (or point/click generating) the scraping code at the customer locations.
jeff-davis 5y ago
Does SQL qualify as Low-Code? A lot of technical non-programmers are very successful using SQL.
- golergka 5y ago
  Using SQL to get reports and analyse existing data, or to actually create schemas, change data, maintain transactions over related changes and so on?
- bob1029 5y ago
  We started leveraging SQL very heavily in our application so that business people can customize app behavior without bothering developers. We are getting close to 100% config-only coverage using SQL. We tried rolling our own scripting language and other ideas, but we decided that we weren't ever going to catch up with the level of testing & validation that SQLite has achieved with any amount of in-house resources. Once we embraced SQLite, we found an entire universe of capability. Here is one of the comments I made just yesterday about this kind of thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27362708
- brixon 5y ago
  Yes since it is describing more what you want and less how to do it, but SQL is not an end-to-end solution.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Pure SQL no, but when coupled together with language extensions and frontends like APEX, it surely is. I have seen departments fully managed with APEX applications.
ajcp 5y ago
I think this article misses the mark of the actual move Microsoft is making here, but I think MSFT also gets their own messaging wrong. Microsoft's "Low-Code" strategy is not RPA, nor is it enabling the development of enterprise applications with "Low Code" development tools. RPA is already a legacy solution in it's current form, and increasingly only useful with regards to mainframe emulators and applications that don't offer an API, which are rarer and rarer with the move to cloud everything. Enterprise applications should only exist as applications, not as components/products of another enterprise application. Microsoft's Low-Code "strategy" is providing tools for business process applications, they're just really bad at messaging that. Enable original data to get into their ecosystem (Power Apps), transform, evaluate, and move it around (Power Automate), and then provide understanding and feedback (Power BI). If every part of their ecosystem -*including their productivity suite and OS*- has an API backing it up (which it does) then their real play here is not providing "Low-Code/No Code" tools for building *applications* but rather for API integration and orchestration. This is the "new" RPA. Why would one need to build an RPA "bot" or enterprise application if one can just generate a form with Power Apps, use Power Automate to reach into your Outlook, Excel, SharePoint List, OneDrive, or Windows file system, and then crap out the desired product in the system of record or a Power BI dashboard? Source: I've worked in the RPA space for over 5 years now as a SWE, Tech Lead, and Architect.
- quyleanh 5y ago
  The original article is brilliant but your correction is much more valuable. Thank you.
  - ajcp 5y ago
    Thank you and it's my pleasure!
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Well said. > The moat protecting the market share of the big RPA companies is created by the mature deployment systems that enable large enterprises to run hundreds or thousands of automated processes This is completely incorrect. Managing processes and bots is the absolute easiest thing they do, because it's entirely under their control and a solved problem. The actual moat is legacy compatibility -- how broad a tech stack does your RPA engine cover? Microsoft Active Accessibility? Excel? Excel + VBScript? Legacy Windows native? VB6? Early Java with custom UI grid classes? The point the author should be making is that Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have zero interest in eating UiPath's lunch. It's expensive (in people-time-dollars) and custom per customer. And ultimately, it's a long-tail game. Microsoft's play is to trivially link together new deployments or migrations (i.e. to O365), then continue adding customers as more migrate to them. Why pay to chase the customer, when they're already running towards you? (FWIW, I think UiPath realizes this, which is why most of their new products / features are pivoting to become an Appian-esque rapid app platform. AA and BP? Less clueful)
m12k 5y ago
I'm currently porting a slackbot to Teams. Even with the backend logic and architecture mostly re-usable, the Teams bot is already taking at least 3x as long to code, simply because their documentation is so obscure. It feels like detective work, correlating data from 4 different tangentially related sources (AzureAD, app authorization flows, Graph, BotFramework). I've never had so many tabs open at once in my life. At one point, I gave up on their documentation, and just traffic-sniffed the library used in one of their example apps in another language, to figure which endpoint to call and which json format to send it. The jump from Slack to Teams feels like the difference between Rails and (Java) Spring - the former makes web-apps, the latter is a framework and dependency injection container, which can be used to make various apps and services, among them web-apps. Long story short, MS is a master at making you appreciate the difference between "technically possible to achieve" and "easy and realistic to achieve". If my experience with them is any indication, MS still has a looong way to go before they can make their ecosystem of services accessible to "normal" people.
- ajcp 5y ago
  I can see that. I think you're best bet is to throw that BotFramework out. I'm not sure why they keep it around, but they've all but replaced it with Power Virtual Agents.
- thrower123 5y ago
  Bot Framework is horrible. It's the most ridiculous IM platform I've built anything for, and I've covered a good bit of the spectrum. They really need to expose a full-featured API for Teams, something at least as powerful as what you used to be able to do with the UCMA SDK for Lync/SfB. I've given up on anything ever getting exposed through Graph API in a timely manner. It took two or three years before you could get online/busy/away presence information on a user without outrageous, unsupported hacks.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    Bot Framework was a good idea: one framework to write a bot for multiple IM platforms at once. But of course it immediately suffered the exact problems you would expect: lowest common denominator features, older target platforms falling into disrepair, new platforms never getting official support, etc. Using Bot Framework to write just for a Teams bot is broken before you start. Using it to support both your Teams and Slack integrations sounds nice on paper, but probably doesn't work in theory as soon as you need platform specific features or do something "advanced". You still can't use Bot Framework with Discord. I liked the theory behind Bot Framework, but the practical reality has so far been mostly a disappointment.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
slumdev 5y ago
How is this conceptually any different from InfoPath + SPD Workflows? And if it's not conceptually different, what's going to make it work this time? Aside - it's probably been discussed ad nauseam, but the Teams vs. Slack graphic is highly misleading because of the way it's bundled and distributed. It'd be like comparing the install base of Notepad vs. that of Notepad++.
- brixon 5y ago
  InfoPath is end of life and PowerApps is their replacement.
dboreham 5y ago
All said with a straight face and no mention of proffering a lollipop...
DonHopkins 5y ago
I bet Microsoft's "Low Code" turns out to be "Slow Code".
- beckingz 5y ago
  This is my experience. PowerBI especially is painfully slow even with tiny data.
- _pmf_ 5y ago
  Since the competition is Electron and JS, the bar is somewhere in the stratosphere.
throwawaysea 5y ago
How much of the differentiation here is because Microsoft is innovating better versus simply their size and ability to use existing sales pipelines and bundling to push these types of features/products? This article even includes a Teams versus Slack graph in it - I can't help but feel sorry for smaller players who will see a gigantic incumbent unfairly eat their lunch without performing the hard work of innovation in the first place.
Tarucho 5y ago
The article looks like a paid ad in disguise.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  It probably is. I already posted a link to it in another comment, but to reiterate, Microsoft's CEO admitted to 'working on' hacker news specifically to sway opinions on Azure. Not much of a stretch to assume they do that for other projects, too. To quote, "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..." https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-2019-005545657.html https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-201...
ARandomerDude 5y ago
The most mind-blowing part of the article was the Teams vs Slack screenshot. https://res.infoq.com/articles/cloud-vendors-low-code/en/resources/1figure-1-tweet-1622199580963.jpg https://res.infoq.com/articles/cloud-vendors-low-code/en/res...
- _jal 5y ago
  Seems like Microsoft feels threatened about once a decade and feels the need to demonstrate how comprehensively it can stomp on someone lacking a similar portfolio.
- AtNightWeCode 5y ago
  You get Teams accounts with pretty much any MS thing. Teams still can't be used for chat in enterprise environments. It is laughable.
  - AtNightWeCode 5y ago
    Some MS person down voted this I guess. :) I have Teams accounts in at least a handful of tenants and it does not work for chatting.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - bsg75 5y ago
    I'm using Teams in a 10,000 person company with employees and external collaborators. Its our primary chat tool, and its used regularly for presentation broadcasts of over 250 people. Is this Enterprise enough?
    - AtNightWeCode 5y ago
      How do you get notifications from all tenants at the same time? How do you even check the other tenants when you are in a Teams meeting? I mean, the client disconnects from the meeting if you try to view other tenants. How can you see which channels across five tenants have new messages? If you are a small company and use Teams internally. Fine, but it simply does not work in an enterprise environments.
AtNightWeCode 5y ago
There has been a huge push for low-code over the last couple of years. The idea that anybody can setup a business flow is compelling and easily sold. But low code means a lot of config and these systems are nothing new and over time they will sooner or later become limiting. If you have everything in code any problem can be solved. You also still need to solve the things like CI/CD, CM, dependencies, data modelling, correctness, resilience, security, compliance, integrations and so on.
jimnotgym 5y ago
If Microsoft were serious about 'low code' we would be looking at Visual Basic 7.
- ffhhj 5y ago
  It would be just another flavour of C#
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  Visual Basic was never "Low Code". It certainly was "RAD" ("Rapid Application Development"), but VB was always a heavier weight language than people thought it was. There was a Visual Basic 7. The current compiler for "Visual Basic 2019" is version number 16.0 and the version numbers carry directly through. The VB team moved on, even if if so many of the users didn't. You can get pretty RAD with WinForms (or WPF) on .NET 5 with VB in Visual Studio right now today. It's not the same ActiveX mess of the 90s but that's a good thing in its own way.
  - mgummelt 5y ago
    Visual Basic is an overloaded term that can refer to both the language and the RAD IDE. The IDE was certainly low-code.
    - WorldMaker 5y ago
      Having done more than my share of coding in VB3-6, I can tell you that VB in any incarnation has never been "low code". If you think that WinForms or XAML in Visual Studio is any less RAD or somehow "more code" than the VB<=6 IDE, you are wearing some amazing nostalgia goggles and I wish I could believe in a world you seem to think existed.
      - mgummelt 5y ago
        Low code just means using visual techniques to replace or augment code, so any WYSIWYG system, including VB or XAML, qualifies.
fartcannon 5y ago
This is the kind of article that I believe would benefit from authorship identification/stylometry. I would like to know how much of the conversation occurring in this comment section is real, and how much of it is part of the recently revealed work that Microsoft has being doing in swaying opinion on hacker news. Wouldn't that be an interesting tool for press releases like this?
- pkilgore 5y ago
  > recently revealed work that Microsoft has being doing in swaying opinion on hacker news I'd love a link. Unfortunately "microsoft and hacker<anything>" get's swallowed up in search results by recent attack news.
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-2019-005545657.html https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-201... "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..."
    - ajcp 5y ago
      Recently? This article is over 2.5 years old...
    - pkilgore 5y ago
      Thanks! Hard to read much into that call other than Microsoft folks 1) Read Hacker News and 2) Are targeting it as an audience for which they would like to be more popular in. You had made it sound like some sort of coordinated astroturfing operation.
- iudqnolq 5y ago
  > it is part of the recently revealed work that Microsoft has being doing in swaying opinion on hacker news. I'm deeply sceptical this is real because the risk would be high and the reward miniscule. Source?
thrower123 5y ago
I know somebody that spent a few days setting up a bunch of these things to handle contact forms on landing pages and that kind of sloggy boring projects. They work fine when they work, but things wig out with them often enough, or they decide that they haven't been run in X days, and are going to be reclaimed, that it's become a hassle that keeps somebody busy about half the time. Job security, if you introduce these low-code solutions, I suppose...
OrvalWintermute 5y ago
I'm surpised there is almost no mention of low-code and the excellent product that Microsoft killed off, in Visual Foxpro https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualstudio/foxpro/mt490117(v=msdn.10)?redirectedfrom=MSDN https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualstu...
- simonbarker87 5y ago
  My last role had A LOT of VFP in the estate and it was still added to on a regular basis and all the main VFP devs kind of loved it.
trixie_ 5y ago
We really need a revolution in the low code space. The amount of code we write - database, backend, api, frontend, etc.. to do the simplest CRUD task, makes me feel like compared to future programmers we're all cavemen rubbing two sticks together.
- ajcp 5y ago
  Perhaps, but our StickOps team is actually engaged since we moved to Sticks as a Service and implemented our MicroRubbing architecture!
- filoeleven 5y ago
  Better tooling for data-oriented interfaces is the answer. Everything CRUD does is at the interface layer. If you improve the semantics and discoverability of the interface, you enable better tools and products to grow from that. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/boundaries https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/boundaries This talk encapsulates (heh) a lot of the ideals that I agree with. Strong guarantees at the interface layer are good, and foster better tools and products, whether they are low code or not. If you know with great specificity what is required at the boundaries, it crystallizes most things inside of any app. It’s not a silver bullet! But it limits the damage we can do and steers us in the right direction.
  - trixie_ 5y ago
    Not sure what this has to do with the immense amount of code that needs to be written across various layers in a stack to do the simplest task. Can you translate this into some real and actionable?
    - filoeleven 5y ago
      This is a late reply, and I think I misunderstood your meaning. I don’t have good answers on how to drop layers from the stack, they all seem pretty necessary. Storage is obvious, backend is needed for authentication if nothing else and powers the API layer. Front end could be replaced by APIs, and often is in products, but someone ultimately has to write a view for humans if humans will use the system.
spoonjim 5y ago
Excel spreadsheets, and now low-code platforms, are how non-coders write functional specifications.
filoeleven 5y ago
I searched the comments for some of the big-name RPA “solutions” I’ve had to work with before, and none of them show up at all (Blue Prism, mentioned in the article, was one of them). Not surprising, since ALL of their documentation on how to use the damn things or even how they work on a technical level is paywalled. As someone who’s had to support them for an org’s clients in the past, that lack of access is extremely frustrating. How can I develop a library that lets clients access the web app through RPA if the vendors refuse to tell me how to make things accessible to them? Waste all around. Good riddance. Not that I’m any more confident about Microsoft’s offering here.
Graffur 5y ago
Who will actually build and maintain these low code solutions? Will it be over qualified SWEs who will lose their skills over time if they work on this stuff? Or will it be citizen developers who were actually hired for some other skill set and won't care for solution design or future planning? Or will it be new employees hired with just this skill set?
- myohmy 5y ago
  Its not a good space for high performers. Regular programmers don't give a fuck. The paycheck spends the same. Management doesn't give a fuck either, so yeah they'll hire for this limited skill set and probably pay less too.
haolez 5y ago
I've tried to buy into this philosophy and ecosystem in my company (I'm the CTO). We have a lot of inneficient processes and I thought that by creating a few flows as an example and giving some training to business people they would become automators. I was wrong. For starters, my company's business people are not curious. This is not necessarily bad, but curiosity is a powerful accelerator for programming and automation tools. They weren't impressed nor motivated to adopt and extend the example flows. In the end, I had programmers creating flows for business people to use, and it was frustrating for the programmers and an uncertain black box for the business people. We even managed to create custom connectors to simplify a few flows. It failed and we gave up. Regarding the specific tools of the "Power Platform", Power Automate has a horrible UI. It's slow, clunky and buggy. Sometimes you try to save your flow and it will give you a weird error. Then you refresh the page, the flow remains exactly the same, but now saving works. It's messy. Power Apps has a bizarre billing/licensing issue. The idea behind the product is appealing, but when you start using it, it's a weird mix of a no-code design app with some legacy Microsoft Dynamics app. User management is confusing and tied to Dynamics. "External" users will cost you a lot more in licensing. You keep bouncing between old Dynamics pages and newer Power Apps ones. Even if you want to pay for the highest tier, it's incredibly difficult to find out how to do it. And if you don't pay for the highest tier upfront, Microsoft will create limitations for you on every corner (like accessing a database or using a given widget). I didn't have any motivation left to try Power BI, but one of my interns told me that a _viewer_ of my dashboards would also need a license to have access to it. I won't revisit these tools anytime soon.
- mgummelt 5y ago
  Were you creating flows in Power Automate or something else?
  - haolez 5y ago
    Power Automate. We tried Zapier as well and it's much better, but the business people were already burned out when we tried it.
mgummelt 5y ago
It's interesting that the article's thesis is almost entirely about about PowerFX, but the 140 comments here so far don't even mention it.
- hudgeon 5y ago
  Thanks. As the article's author (and first time writing something that hits HN) it's been interesting seeing which parts of the article have struck a nerve and which parts have gone through to the keeper.
  - mgummelt 5y ago
    :) While I have you here, I have to say I still don't understand the connection you're making between PowerFX and compatibility with existing deployment systems. I understand that a low-code platform that spits out an app in some sort of standard format, like source code or a docker image, would facilitate that integration, but where does PowerFX come in?
    - hudgeon 5y ago
      PowerFX is MS's name for the standard code format. I believe their ultimate goal is that: - business users build apps using a graphical low-code interface, - these then convert to PowerFX source code that goes into the enterprise's source control system. - The enterprise IT team tests the code, re-writes key components and deploys. - And these changes are then reflected back into the low-code app development environment. This allows business users to contribute domain expertise and IT to maintain their quality and governance role. Needless to say, this is non-trivial from a tech perspective but, in my view, is a better approach than an enterprise having a separate deployment and governance framework for low-code/RPA apps than for their other custom applications developed in Java/C++ etc.
      - mgummelt 5y ago
        Where are you seeing that it's a standard code format? I've skimmed this: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/what-is-microsoft-power-fx/ https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/what-is-microsoft... and it seems that it's just a simple expression language, not a standard format that an entire PowerApps app would compile down to.
foxbee 5y ago
I really hope open source tools like: Budibase https://github.com/Budibase/budibase https://github.com/Budibase/budibase NocoDB https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb Take off. Microsoft are chasing revenue and aim to lure you into their walled garden.

215 points by tlochhead 5y ago

I'll admit, I'm being a hater. But how is this different from Sun Studio of yore, Adobe Flex Designer View or anything else?

radicalbyte 5y ago
Sharepoint 2.0
- _pmf_ 5y ago
  Also: Lotus Notes

bob1029 5y ago

Who has actually seen a success story with this sort of thing? We arrived at "low-code", but by way of actually solving our problem domain through many hellish iterations and figuring out what all of the various points of configuration should be. As far as I am aware, this is not something that Microsoft or any other vendor can determine for your business ahead of time. I am sure that there are a lot of types of smaller needs that can be addressed with these sorts of tools, but the big tasks of integrating multiple unique/legacy business systems together into a single logical process with its own internal state is not ever feasible with these tools. You can always get close, but its like a siren song in my experience.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
CharlesW 5y ago
Do you consider Excel a low-code solution?
- bob1029 5y ago
  That depends on how you use excel. Lots of formulas, et. al. would probably become easier to manage as part of a proper codebase at some point.
  - haswell 5y ago
    On the flip side, some of those spreadsheets that reach the "would be easier to manage with a proper codebase" status never would have gotten off the ground had they started as a development project.
    - bob1029 5y ago
      It really is full-circle with excel. You can start there, then wind up using it again once you realize its still an excellent data interchange mechanism.
MangoCoffee 5y ago
We have a Microsoft "Access app" build by a ex employee. it was used by a lot of people and now in process to be rewritten into a web app. i guess that's a success story(?). >I am sure that there are a lot of types of smaller needs that can be addressed with these sorts of tools, but the big tasks of integrating multiple unique/legacy business systems together into a single logical process with its own internal state is not ever feasible with these tools. You can always get close, but its like a siren song in my experience. i'm fine with that. when they hit a problem that no Microsoft "connector" can solve. you charge them 10x to implement a real solution.
tyingq 5y ago
"Who has actually seen a success story with this sort of thing?" Citizen development stuff is usually more successful than an IT department knows. They think it's failing because every time they hear about it, it's because of some mess. The thing is, they don't hear about all the stuff that works fine. There's typically a ton of MS Access, Quickbase, Excel, Google Sheets, Salesforce, etc, "apps" written and run by non-tech folks that the IT department never knows about.
- Graffur 5y ago
  This stuff is a tactical solution that fills a gap in poor business solutions. Give it 5, 10 years and these non-IT solutions will be a nightmare for everyone involved.
mywittyname 5y ago
This stuff is really prevalent. I'm a programmer and I'll happily build out some low-code solution in Google Sheets or whatever. Since it takes out of the equation a whole host of potential workloads (deployment, environment maintenance, source code control, etc), these low-code solutions offer rapid deployment of prototypes. Often times, these little prototypes end up being used by 100s of people within a company. I love it because I bill out like $x0k for a few days of work. Once it's done, I pretty much never have to support it, since Google is managing that for me. Clients love it because development is done in a few days and they never seem to have to contact anyone for support. The successful ones always lead to more business. Especially with megacorps with lots of brands. Brand X will show off their new dashboard, and Brand Y wants their own version and will happily pay pretty close to the original price for basically a copy-pasta job.
myohmy 5y ago
Low-code has been a success in my org, because it's driven by programmers with business analyst acumen. Its not for everyone, but for the right person, it just clicks and they can sit down with a client and come up with something great in very little time. It works very, very well as a rapid prototype or MVP tool.

dnndev 5y ago

This is addressing a market. I have seen it first hand more than once. Highly driven and competent individuals that are not programmers for whatever reason and that create a monstrosity that works (using some low code solution). It’s ugly and buggy but gets a job done. This works for as long as they don’t hit a technical limitation then call devs like myself in to replace it. It was a great phase 1 and made money. They earned a project with developers. Yes it will cost more to rewrite it but the old system is still making money while the new one rolls out. At this point a low code solution makes no sense for me as a dev - believe me I have tried them. Kudos to MS.

MattGaiser 5y ago
I think low code works for smaller more routine projects where hiring devs is just not all that feasible.
- asdfman123 5y ago
  A lot of people stuck in places like, say, the accounting department have the soul of a dev. They like technology and want to automate things. And often times when they do that, they actually improve their departments quite a bit with stuff like VBA and Access projects (as uncool as they may seem to some). It works because "real" programming environments have learning curves that are hard to tackle if you have a day job, and even if you do tackle them, IT is probably not going to give you direct database access. I had a friend like this, who was bored as shit as an accountant. I convinced him to migrate his career to software and now he's in a data science master's program.
  - Asymmetryk 5y ago
    if I may be so bold ( and presumptuous my suggestion is of any value) I wondered if your friend would like the risk and structured securities aspects of actuarial catastrophe risk markets. This pretty much has everything in it, from chaos theory to the statistics of the cadence of liabilities upon the different kinds of financial engineering structure that are used to distribute * the liability and fund the most difficult to reinsure policies in the capital markets. edit : * and package, according to a tremendous variety of fiscal requirements and risk appetites. And naturally covering the most extreme conditions liability payments is historically a fascinating insight into how we developed our world across and binding together such tenuous links.

omk 5y ago

If this works, Microsoft is going to hit a long-term retention jackpot. Low-code ecosystems are sticky and excel in ARR as their model is usually consumption based. Moving away costs companies millions. Every employee is automating their work on this platform. I working with a consulting firm and one of our customers (+50,000 employees) has onboarded power-platform for every individual to automate their work. If ever a change is proposed, the change management team is going to shoot this down or will be forced to create a 5 year migration plan.

akudha 5y ago
I think it will work, especially if Microsoft can also build self hosted version of some of these tools. There is a huge market for such tools (look at how much attention self hosted Airtable alternatives are getting). Between self/cloud hosted versions, their sales machine and deep integrations, Microsoft has a huge advantage over Google and Amazon.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  At BUILD this year Microsoft announced Azure Arc which runs on any Kubernetes cluster (including ones you spin up on AWS, GCP, or a laptop on a desk somewhere) and supports running a surprising number of Azure services already (Azure App Services, Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, and supposedly growing). Administration can happen in the regular Azure Portal and it just looks like you are deploying to a custom datacenter region in the Portal. It's really slick. It's also pretty obvious that many of the services they've focused on at first are some of the underlying foundations of their Low Code efforts, so I would be surprised if Power Apps and Power BI also eventually wind up on that list of Azure Arc supported. Azure Arc seems like a really interesting "compromise" on "self-hosted" (depending of course, on which reasons you have to need "self-hosting"). (Azure also has Azure Stack which is the entirely self-hosted datacenter version too. I don't think that yet supports these Low Code tools yet either, but it's probably even closer to having the foundations for that in place.)
jerf 5y ago
I don't know if they're pursuing this, but Microsoft also has the opportunity to create low-code solutions that more gracefully transition into conventional solutions, because unlike a pure-low-code play, that doesn't have to mean they are losing a customer. They aren't incentivized to lock you in to low code as long as one way or another you pay Microsoft on the way out, too, via either being in the conventional Microsoft developer ecosystem or being on Azure. Given that they seems to be acquiring they way into this market, I'm sure it's nowhere near this integrated yet, but could you imagine being able to take any individual component of the system, or the system as a whole, and getting a "Click Here to create a Visual Studio Project" that completely replicates the low-code solution into Visual Studio, ready and waiting for you to start modifying it? Probably with some sort of automatic "Click Here to Deploy Your Changes Into Azure"?

syshum 5y ago

Low Code is the modern version of "Write Once run Anywhere" It is pipe dream that will cost companies millions in Vendor Lockin, rewrites, and all of the other problems that come with non-developers "developing" See the nightmare that is Excel Workbooks, the fact they are modeling FX on Excel Function is a horror I do not even want to think about

shadowgovt 5y ago
The relevant question, I think, is extensibility. If the low-code solution, upon hitting a wall, can be extended instead of rewritten, it's going to be a great solution for small companies to prove out ideas without the cost of general-purpose developers and custom software stacks built from general-purpose software. If any company can solve the extensibility question, I think Microsoft has a better-than-average shot at it.
haswell 5y ago
> will cost companies millions in Vendor Lockin, rewrites, and all of the other problems that come with non-developers "developing" What many folks miss here is that companies still willingly proceed despite these drawbacks because of the value that the end result provides. These tradeoffs are often less apparent when coming from a software development background or working for a company that builds software. But if you're in a different type of org - say financial services - these solutions are often the difference between launching a new product/capability, or putting structure around a paper process...or accomplishing absolutely nothing because development is currently tied up for the next two years. Not all companies have IT/Dev orgs that are capable of meeting the demands of the business. Some orgs are transforming their businesses (the "digital transformation" buzzword), and don't have a dev team at all. At best, they have some centralized IT department that is capable of rolling out point solutions. You might be right that these solutions are inherently inferior from a technical perspective, but if you look at this from a business outcome perspective, those tradeoffs are often worthwhile.
- syshum 5y ago
  I agree somewhat, the problem with "business outcome perspective" likely means very short term thinking, get it done now, deal with the rest later. The people that cause the mess are not likely the ones that have to clean up the mess, people like me are. I prefer to greenfield things but instead I spend the majority of my time untangling the bad choices people made years before coming at it from a "business outcome perspective" There should be some kind of middle ground, likely starting with proper, actual training and restricting access to low code solution to people that have at least some technical literacy which often does not happen.

aparsons 5y ago

Microsoft has always had the best developer tools. This is an exciting step forward for low-code

ajcp 5y ago
Coming up in the time when MSFT was the "big evil" it's almost depressing to see myself now as an actual fan-boy.
- aparsons 5y ago
  The thing is, even when they were big evil, they had the best developer tooling by a mile. Visual Studio, MSDN, etc were novel and leagues ahead of other platform providers’ equivalents
  - ffhhj 5y ago
    Visual Studio is a copy of Delphi from the 90's.

tyingq 5y ago

I would guess the RPA hype wagon will slow down on its own accord soon. The big users will start to see the downsides now that their implementations have been up a while. Scraping is brittle. And I imagine it's not experienced developers writing (or point/click generating) the scraping code at the customer locations.

jeff-davis 5y ago

Does SQL qualify as Low-Code? A lot of technical non-programmers are very successful using SQL.

golergka 5y ago
Using SQL to get reports and analyse existing data, or to actually create schemas, change data, maintain transactions over related changes and so on?
bob1029 5y ago
We started leveraging SQL very heavily in our application so that business people can customize app behavior without bothering developers. We are getting close to 100% config-only coverage using SQL. We tried rolling our own scripting language and other ideas, but we decided that we weren't ever going to catch up with the level of testing & validation that SQLite has achieved with any amount of in-house resources. Once we embraced SQLite, we found an entire universe of capability. Here is one of the comments I made just yesterday about this kind of thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27362708
brixon 5y ago
Yes since it is describing more what you want and less how to do it, but SQL is not an end-to-end solution.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Pure SQL no, but when coupled together with language extensions and frontends like APEX, it surely is. I have seen departments fully managed with APEX applications.

ajcp 5y ago

I think this article misses the mark of the actual move Microsoft is making here, but I think MSFT also gets their own messaging wrong. Microsoft's "Low-Code" strategy is not RPA, nor is it enabling the development of enterprise applications with "Low Code" development tools. RPA is already a legacy solution in it's current form, and increasingly only useful with regards to mainframe emulators and applications that don't offer an API, which are rarer and rarer with the move to cloud everything. Enterprise applications should only exist as applications, not as components/products of another enterprise application. Microsoft's Low-Code "strategy" is providing tools for business process applications, they're just really bad at messaging that. Enable original data to get into their ecosystem (Power Apps), transform, evaluate, and move it around (Power Automate), and then provide understanding and feedback (Power BI). If every part of their ecosystem -*including their productivity suite and OS*- has an API backing it up (which it does) then their real play here is not providing "Low-Code/No Code" tools for building *applications* but rather for API integration and orchestration. This is the "new" RPA. Why would one need to build an RPA "bot" or enterprise application if one can just generate a form with Power Apps, use Power Automate to reach into your Outlook, Excel, SharePoint List, OneDrive, or Windows file system, and then crap out the desired product in the system of record or a Power BI dashboard? Source: I've worked in the RPA space for over 5 years now as a SWE, Tech Lead, and Architect.

quyleanh 5y ago
The original article is brilliant but your correction is much more valuable. Thank you.
- ajcp 5y ago
  Thank you and it's my pleasure!
ethbr0 5y ago
Well said. > The moat protecting the market share of the big RPA companies is created by the mature deployment systems that enable large enterprises to run hundreds or thousands of automated processes This is completely incorrect. Managing processes and bots is the absolute easiest thing they do, because it's entirely under their control and a solved problem. The actual moat is legacy compatibility -- how broad a tech stack does your RPA engine cover? Microsoft Active Accessibility? Excel? Excel + VBScript? Legacy Windows native? VB6? Early Java with custom UI grid classes? The point the author should be making is that Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have zero interest in eating UiPath's lunch. It's expensive (in people-time-dollars) and custom per customer. And ultimately, it's a long-tail game. Microsoft's play is to trivially link together new deployments or migrations (i.e. to O365), then continue adding customers as more migrate to them. Why pay to chase the customer, when they're already running towards you? (FWIW, I think UiPath realizes this, which is why most of their new products / features are pivoting to become an Appian-esque rapid app platform. AA and BP? Less clueful)

m12k 5y ago

I'm currently porting a slackbot to Teams. Even with the backend logic and architecture mostly re-usable, the Teams bot is already taking at least 3x as long to code, simply because their documentation is so obscure. It feels like detective work, correlating data from 4 different tangentially related sources (AzureAD, app authorization flows, Graph, BotFramework). I've never had so many tabs open at once in my life. At one point, I gave up on their documentation, and just traffic-sniffed the library used in one of their example apps in another language, to figure which endpoint to call and which json format to send it. The jump from Slack to Teams feels like the difference between Rails and (Java) Spring - the former makes web-apps, the latter is a framework and dependency injection container, which can be used to make various apps and services, among them web-apps. Long story short, MS is a master at making you appreciate the difference between "technically possible to achieve" and "easy and realistic to achieve". If my experience with them is any indication, MS still has a looong way to go before they can make their ecosystem of services accessible to "normal" people.

ajcp 5y ago
I can see that. I think you're best bet is to throw that BotFramework out. I'm not sure why they keep it around, but they've all but replaced it with Power Virtual Agents.
thrower123 5y ago
Bot Framework is horrible. It's the most ridiculous IM platform I've built anything for, and I've covered a good bit of the spectrum. They really need to expose a full-featured API for Teams, something at least as powerful as what you used to be able to do with the UCMA SDK for Lync/SfB. I've given up on anything ever getting exposed through Graph API in a timely manner. It took two or three years before you could get online/busy/away presence information on a user without outrageous, unsupported hacks.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  Bot Framework was a good idea: one framework to write a bot for multiple IM platforms at once. But of course it immediately suffered the exact problems you would expect: lowest common denominator features, older target platforms falling into disrepair, new platforms never getting official support, etc. Using Bot Framework to write just for a Teams bot is broken before you start. Using it to support both your Teams and Slack integrations sounds nice on paper, but probably doesn't work in theory as soon as you need platform specific features or do something "advanced". You still can't use Bot Framework with Discord. I liked the theory behind Bot Framework, but the practical reality has so far been mostly a disappointment.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

slumdev 5y ago

How is this conceptually any different from InfoPath + SPD Workflows? And if it's not conceptually different, what's going to make it work this time? Aside - it's probably been discussed ad nauseam, but the Teams vs. Slack graphic is highly misleading because of the way it's bundled and distributed. It'd be like comparing the install base of Notepad vs. that of Notepad++.

brixon 5y ago
InfoPath is end of life and PowerApps is their replacement.

dboreham 5y ago

All said with a straight face and no mention of proffering a lollipop...

DonHopkins 5y ago

I bet Microsoft's "Low Code" turns out to be "Slow Code".

beckingz 5y ago
This is my experience. PowerBI especially is painfully slow even with tiny data.
_pmf_ 5y ago
Since the competition is Electron and JS, the bar is somewhere in the stratosphere.

throwawaysea 5y ago

How much of the differentiation here is because Microsoft is innovating better versus simply their size and ability to use existing sales pipelines and bundling to push these types of features/products? This article even includes a Teams versus Slack graph in it - I can't help but feel sorry for smaller players who will see a gigantic incumbent unfairly eat their lunch without performing the hard work of innovation in the first place.

Tarucho 5y ago

The article looks like a paid ad in disguise.

fartcannon 5y ago
It probably is. I already posted a link to it in another comment, but to reiterate, Microsoft's CEO admitted to 'working on' hacker news specifically to sway opinions on Azure. Not much of a stretch to assume they do that for other projects, too. To quote, "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..." https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-2019-005545657.html https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-201...

ARandomerDude 5y ago

The most mind-blowing part of the article was the Teams vs Slack screenshot. https://res.infoq.com/articles/cloud-vendors-low-code/en/resources/1figure-1-tweet-1622199580963.jpg https://res.infoq.com/articles/cloud-vendors-low-code/en/res...

_jal 5y ago
Seems like Microsoft feels threatened about once a decade and feels the need to demonstrate how comprehensively it can stomp on someone lacking a similar portfolio.
AtNightWeCode 5y ago
You get Teams accounts with pretty much any MS thing. Teams still can't be used for chat in enterprise environments. It is laughable.
- AtNightWeCode 5y ago
  Some MS person down voted this I guess. :) I have Teams accounts in at least a handful of tenants and it does not work for chatting.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- bsg75 5y ago
  I'm using Teams in a 10,000 person company with employees and external collaborators. Its our primary chat tool, and its used regularly for presentation broadcasts of over 250 people. Is this Enterprise enough?
  - AtNightWeCode 5y ago
    How do you get notifications from all tenants at the same time? How do you even check the other tenants when you are in a Teams meeting? I mean, the client disconnects from the meeting if you try to view other tenants. How can you see which channels across five tenants have new messages? If you are a small company and use Teams internally. Fine, but it simply does not work in an enterprise environments.

AtNightWeCode 5y ago

There has been a huge push for low-code over the last couple of years. The idea that anybody can setup a business flow is compelling and easily sold. But low code means a lot of config and these systems are nothing new and over time they will sooner or later become limiting. If you have everything in code any problem can be solved. You also still need to solve the things like CI/CD, CM, dependencies, data modelling, correctness, resilience, security, compliance, integrations and so on.

jimnotgym 5y ago

If Microsoft were serious about 'low code' we would be looking at Visual Basic 7.

ffhhj 5y ago
It would be just another flavour of C#
WorldMaker 5y ago
Visual Basic was never "Low Code". It certainly was "RAD" ("Rapid Application Development"), but VB was always a heavier weight language than people thought it was. There was a Visual Basic 7. The current compiler for "Visual Basic 2019" is version number 16.0 and the version numbers carry directly through. The VB team moved on, even if if so many of the users didn't. You can get pretty RAD with WinForms (or WPF) on .NET 5 with VB in Visual Studio right now today. It's not the same ActiveX mess of the 90s but that's a good thing in its own way.
- mgummelt 5y ago
  Visual Basic is an overloaded term that can refer to both the language and the RAD IDE. The IDE was certainly low-code.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    Having done more than my share of coding in VB3-6, I can tell you that VB in any incarnation has never been "low code". If you think that WinForms or XAML in Visual Studio is any less RAD or somehow "more code" than the VB<=6 IDE, you are wearing some amazing nostalgia goggles and I wish I could believe in a world you seem to think existed.
    - mgummelt 5y ago
      Low code just means using visual techniques to replace or augment code, so any WYSIWYG system, including VB or XAML, qualifies.

fartcannon 5y ago

This is the kind of article that I believe would benefit from authorship identification/stylometry. I would like to know how much of the conversation occurring in this comment section is real, and how much of it is part of the recently revealed work that Microsoft has being doing in swaying opinion on hacker news. Wouldn't that be an interesting tool for press releases like this?

pkilgore 5y ago
> recently revealed work that Microsoft has being doing in swaying opinion on hacker news I'd love a link. Unfortunately "microsoft and hacker<anything>" get's swallowed up in search results by recent attack news.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-2019-005545657.html https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-201... "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..."
  - ajcp 5y ago
    Recently? This article is over 2.5 years old...
  - pkilgore 5y ago
    Thanks! Hard to read much into that call other than Microsoft folks 1) Read Hacker News and 2) Are targeting it as an audience for which they would like to be more popular in. You had made it sound like some sort of coordinated astroturfing operation.
iudqnolq 5y ago
> it is part of the recently revealed work that Microsoft has being doing in swaying opinion on hacker news. I'm deeply sceptical this is real because the risk would be high and the reward miniscule. Source?

thrower123 5y ago

I know somebody that spent a few days setting up a bunch of these things to handle contact forms on landing pages and that kind of sloggy boring projects. They work fine when they work, but things wig out with them often enough, or they decide that they haven't been run in X days, and are going to be reclaimed, that it's become a hassle that keeps somebody busy about half the time. Job security, if you introduce these low-code solutions, I suppose...

OrvalWintermute 5y ago

I'm surpised there is almost no mention of low-code and the excellent product that Microsoft killed off, in Visual Foxpro https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualstudio/foxpro/mt490117(v=msdn.10)?redirectedfrom=MSDN https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualstu...

simonbarker87 5y ago
My last role had A LOT of VFP in the estate and it was still added to on a regular basis and all the main VFP devs kind of loved it.

trixie_ 5y ago

We really need a revolution in the low code space. The amount of code we write - database, backend, api, frontend, etc.. to do the simplest CRUD task, makes me feel like compared to future programmers we're all cavemen rubbing two sticks together.

ajcp 5y ago
Perhaps, but our StickOps team is actually engaged since we moved to Sticks as a Service and implemented our MicroRubbing architecture!
filoeleven 5y ago
Better tooling for data-oriented interfaces is the answer. Everything CRUD does is at the interface layer. If you improve the semantics and discoverability of the interface, you enable better tools and products to grow from that. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/boundaries https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/boundaries This talk encapsulates (heh) a lot of the ideals that I agree with. Strong guarantees at the interface layer are good, and foster better tools and products, whether they are low code or not. If you know with great specificity what is required at the boundaries, it crystallizes most things inside of any app. It’s not a silver bullet! But it limits the damage we can do and steers us in the right direction.
- trixie_ 5y ago
  Not sure what this has to do with the immense amount of code that needs to be written across various layers in a stack to do the simplest task. Can you translate this into some real and actionable?
  - filoeleven 5y ago
    This is a late reply, and I think I misunderstood your meaning. I don’t have good answers on how to drop layers from the stack, they all seem pretty necessary. Storage is obvious, backend is needed for authentication if nothing else and powers the API layer. Front end could be replaced by APIs, and often is in products, but someone ultimately has to write a view for humans if humans will use the system.

spoonjim 5y ago

Excel spreadsheets, and now low-code platforms, are how non-coders write functional specifications.

filoeleven 5y ago

I searched the comments for some of the big-name RPA “solutions” I’ve had to work with before, and none of them show up at all (Blue Prism, mentioned in the article, was one of them). Not surprising, since ALL of their documentation on how to use the damn things or even how they work on a technical level is paywalled. As someone who’s had to support them for an org’s clients in the past, that lack of access is extremely frustrating. How can I develop a library that lets clients access the web app through RPA if the vendors refuse to tell me how to make things accessible to them? Waste all around. Good riddance. Not that I’m any more confident about Microsoft’s offering here.

Graffur 5y ago

Who will actually build and maintain these low code solutions? Will it be over qualified SWEs who will lose their skills over time if they work on this stuff? Or will it be citizen developers who were actually hired for some other skill set and won't care for solution design or future planning? Or will it be new employees hired with just this skill set?

myohmy 5y ago
Its not a good space for high performers. Regular programmers don't give a fuck. The paycheck spends the same. Management doesn't give a fuck either, so yeah they'll hire for this limited skill set and probably pay less too.

haolez 5y ago

I've tried to buy into this philosophy and ecosystem in my company (I'm the CTO). We have a lot of inneficient processes and I thought that by creating a few flows as an example and giving some training to business people they would become automators. I was wrong. For starters, my company's business people are not curious. This is not necessarily bad, but curiosity is a powerful accelerator for programming and automation tools. They weren't impressed nor motivated to adopt and extend the example flows. In the end, I had programmers creating flows for business people to use, and it was frustrating for the programmers and an uncertain black box for the business people. We even managed to create custom connectors to simplify a few flows. It failed and we gave up. Regarding the specific tools of the "Power Platform", Power Automate has a horrible UI. It's slow, clunky and buggy. Sometimes you try to save your flow and it will give you a weird error. Then you refresh the page, the flow remains exactly the same, but now saving works. It's messy. Power Apps has a bizarre billing/licensing issue. The idea behind the product is appealing, but when you start using it, it's a weird mix of a no-code design app with some legacy Microsoft Dynamics app. User management is confusing and tied to Dynamics. "External" users will cost you a lot more in licensing. You keep bouncing between old Dynamics pages and newer Power Apps ones. Even if you want to pay for the highest tier, it's incredibly difficult to find out how to do it. And if you don't pay for the highest tier upfront, Microsoft will create limitations for you on every corner (like accessing a database or using a given widget). I didn't have any motivation left to try Power BI, but one of my interns told me that a _viewer_ of my dashboards would also need a license to have access to it. I won't revisit these tools anytime soon.

mgummelt 5y ago
Were you creating flows in Power Automate or something else?
- haolez 5y ago
  Power Automate. We tried Zapier as well and it's much better, but the business people were already burned out when we tried it.

mgummelt 5y ago

It's interesting that the article's thesis is almost entirely about about PowerFX, but the 140 comments here so far don't even mention it.

hudgeon 5y ago
Thanks. As the article's author (and first time writing something that hits HN) it's been interesting seeing which parts of the article have struck a nerve and which parts have gone through to the keeper.
- mgummelt 5y ago
  :) While I have you here, I have to say I still don't understand the connection you're making between PowerFX and compatibility with existing deployment systems. I understand that a low-code platform that spits out an app in some sort of standard format, like source code or a docker image, would facilitate that integration, but where does PowerFX come in?
  - hudgeon 5y ago
    PowerFX is MS's name for the standard code format. I believe their ultimate goal is that: - business users build apps using a graphical low-code interface, - these then convert to PowerFX source code that goes into the enterprise's source control system. - The enterprise IT team tests the code, re-writes key components and deploys. - And these changes are then reflected back into the low-code app development environment. This allows business users to contribute domain expertise and IT to maintain their quality and governance role. Needless to say, this is non-trivial from a tech perspective but, in my view, is a better approach than an enterprise having a separate deployment and governance framework for low-code/RPA apps than for their other custom applications developed in Java/C++ etc.
    - mgummelt 5y ago
      Where are you seeing that it's a standard code format? I've skimmed this: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/what-is-microsoft-power-fx/ https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/what-is-microsoft... and it seems that it's just a simple expression language, not a standard format that an entire PowerApps app would compile down to.

foxbee 5y ago

I really hope open source tools like: Budibase https://github.com/Budibase/budibase https://github.com/Budibase/budibase NocoDB https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb Take off. Microsoft are chasing revenue and aim to lure you into their walled garden.