Into. . . thin air?

Watch for updates here as more info becomes available!

9.8.26

For the last month, I’ve been marinating in the news of Airtable’s acquisition by Italian private equity investment company Bending Spoons. As you might imagine, there are plenty of opinions and contingency plans flying around, including Lex Roman’s pieces HERE and HERE. I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but, I’m fairly certain we can expect some amount of enshittification to ensue.

My mom says, “it’s always too soon to panic,” so at this point I’m just planning to keep watch over the next 6 months to a year, as the acquisition is finalized, to see what we might begin to expect. I’m part of an active Airtable consultant and developer community, and I’m also taking Lex’s advice to heart - stay tech agnostic, because “any apps you are fully dependent on could go belly up at any moment.”

Honestly, as much as I love Airtable (and you all know that I do), I take this as an excellent opportunity to return to the guiding principles that govern relational database technology. The operative word being “relational.” Whether Airtable remains the most viable tool, or we all migrate elsewhere eventually, I’m going to keep spreading the good word of linked records, conditional filters, and single-source-of-truth operations - iykyk.