You're right but I do feel like this is more of a case of different paradigms being a slow burn rather than a failure.

I don't see people switching to Claude sheets overnight & the messaging from anthropic will likely become less effusive over time (short-/medium-term). But I'd be surprised if this doesn't make significant inroads in the long-term.

Claude design was good and it only gets better at design. For solo projects, it’s much better. They’re moving it from standalone to being fully integrated.

Figma is the default for teams but is losing a lot of stickiness.

Claude Design is a great idea but a terrible product. Claude Design may not kill figma but "something like claude design" probably will.

I think its shortsighted tbh. The advances are crazy. One will just release another claude design later and before you know it, it'll just be super figma.

What these tools are generally missing is a way for the user to "fix stuff" that isnt just prompting. Once they add things like that, added to model improvements... it's just going to be a cost story: which one is cheaper.

Once you understand how far you can push it, Claude Design is an incredible tool - my personal favorite ai-related thing of the year. Of course it's piggybacking off all the model advancements which has made it increasingly capable.

I'm really happy with what Claude can do with Reladraw. No longer are objects colliding on the drawing (see Mermaid, draw.io). The artifacts that Claude can create off of "lighter" tools will make me go there 80% of the time, Figma and other "heavies" can stay in the 20%. More like 90/10 actually.

> When Anthropic released "claude design" people were telling that figma is dead now, but in fact claude design didn't move forward and stayed as a "fallback tool" when you quickly need to check / edit something.

I don't think there is a reasonable expectation that these new tools will simply end Google Workspace. Google are going to be just fine to do whatever they want with their stuff, and they have the customers.

Anthropic can just do this for a new generation of people and businesses, and establish themselves here over time.

I wouldn't take any "X is dead" as more than just momentarily hype, we should get used to it now that it's been happening for years.

For me, this is simply a first-party UI for Claude. So they have better control over the presentation layer + some extra features on top.

It's not meant to be equivalent to Google Sheets or Excel.

True, but still waiting for Figma stock recovery :(

Figma is trading lower now than it did when Claude Design was released with a total stock drop of 56.38% from Nov 10, 2025 to Nov 10, 2026.

So yes, not dead and clearly good for people who want that additional layer of control, but also nowhere where it used to be.

It just shows that they hired a lot of productive people and gave them a lot of autonomy. Google went through a protracted period of this, culminating in the "more wood behind fewer arrows" mandate in 2011 where they decided to shutter stagnating, abandoned, or distraction efforts.

I expect that Anthropic will have success in some of their side hustles if they're reinforced by the model ecosystem and double down on them, but you should also expect that at some point in the future we will talk about the "Anthropic Graveyard".

Vertical integration was always in the cards, unfortunately.

Whiteboarding is the main thing I do in my AI build processes outside of Claude - if they can do it native + multiplayer, it's going to be a huge UX improvement for a lot of users.

> Shows that the regular avenues of revenue growth are slowing down

Why does it show that? Maybe they have tens of billions of dollars and the bandwidth to do more.

Which will cause customers to leave. Good thing I just bought a fresh batch of popcorn from Costco.

That's the goal. They're desperately trying to make their platform 'sticky'. I see OpenAI using similar tactics with Spaces and Dots.

Dots in particular display some insidious methodology, they've hidden the "programmable" portions of an agent. They want to make it 'magic' (all your work goes through a single tool) but... that's pretty much exactly what businesses DON'T want. We need to see what it's doing, accessing, working with, underlying data, etc... It's an explicit business requirement for us.

The more they can 'hide' what the backend does, the harder it is to get away from the product.

Buuuuut, I don't think it's going to work. I can still export it somehow if I want to, and it would probably take 10-15 minutes... The whole point of these agents is that they're 'plug and play' with whatever technology you want.

And if they don't build them this way, someone will whip up an open source version that does it cheaper and more transparently in a couple of weeks.

Software being free now hits both of these companies exactly where they want protection.

> I read this as: We'll build anything and everything into Claude eventually.

Well, isn't that the natural end result of an AGI?

No more software, no more deciding what apps you need. It's all just Claude. Except now you're pulling 10kW to add up a column of numbers.

I mean, I don't think it's that different from the current reality of businesses just picking Microsoft or Google as their one-stop-shop for business software. There will actually be more competition now, as Anthropic and OpenAI will be added to the mix.

The playbook Anthropic is following with integrating everything innto their platform is the same playbook that enabled Microsoft, Google, Baidu, Amazon, Apple, etc al to get and stay where they are.

>How does this work long-term? Is the new reality going to be picking an AI provider for all of your SaSS tooling,

I suspect the goal is partly starting a walled garden.

"Llms are interchangeable? Our harness/toolset isn't".

It's a way to get a moat I guess.

It doesn't sound like a business for the scale they're aiming for though. Taking a bite of the MS office's pie doesn't seem to me like a trillion dollar company move.

Claude becomes a no-code platform with all the same shortcomings they have.

The rest of the world moves on using LLMs as tools.

Anthropic is eventually bought and stripped for parts.

Competition will thrive as it always does, wouldn’t worry about that. In this case I view Claude as more of the competitor here. Ever try using Co-pilot in Microsoft Office?

“Please remove this page break I can’t figure out how to get rid of and someone else added”

Co-pilot: “Sorry I’m unable to do that but you can follows these same instructions you can find on the Internet to accomplish that”.

Claude: “I will literally rebuild Word from the ground up to solve this problem if that’s what it takes (but here is how to actually solve your problem), oh and do you want this exported in the best format for this software, this other software, or in these 15 file formats? Oh I don’t have native capabilities for that format - ok let’s build a script and convert….”

You get the picture. Competition is here, and it will get even better. Many SaaS companies will die. Good. Many of them only delivered short-term value solving artificial constrains or gaps in software.

For now. I think they are slowly getting to the point where their models are powerful enough that they feel they can compete with everyone in everything.

When Google Docs were out, Microsoft already had a 20-year lead. So shouldn't have they made Google Doc?

And the story repeats. Google had a 20-year lead in search and LLM definitely has threatened it.

They are building a walled garden platform the same way Apple and Microsoft does. This isn't at all a surprising move.

I don't see them as side quests but rather as a complement to what they offer.

A typical workflow is: connect via MCP to some data source. Do some stats, transformations, etc. Put the data in a format that Claude understands or will understand better later. Make a UI/story out of it. Keep track of your "things" through visualizations.

Been using this worlflow extensively now. This is their easy wall garden.

It's a desperation move. They're listing because they're out of runway, they're trying to extend the runway.

Tell that to google sheets or google docs?? At some point you want to easily interoperate with a document or spreadsheet artifact. There aren't great drop in solutions while keeping everything within managed context. Compiling to and from docx or xls files don't make sense. It makes the most sense to spin up your own. What do you expect them to do instead?

40 year lead in bloat and legacy cruft maybe

> You are not going to dethrone them no matter how good your AI’s code is.

They absolutely are. Maybe not quickly (let's face it, Excel users are not sprightly), but this is absolutely going to displace Gsuite, and any Excel users who were thinking of moving to it.

I expect Google will respond.

Are they? Still seems way more convenient to just connect Claude to whatever people are already running.

Nobody is replacing excel anywhere.

I did my first claude slides presentation. I don't see myself voluntarily loading up PowerPoint again.

Now it'll be harder to do the same for word and harder still for excel, but word is doable, and claude can build one off tools better than excel can, so I definitely think that MS should be wary.

Nadella already said that they expect to have more revenue from agents than from humans.

They are shifting to building stuff for agents, not for humans.

Yep, just need Claude Mail (Cmail, anyone?) and Cluade Docs and you have a strong competitor to Google Workspaces. I'd consider using Cmail to start getting out of googles ad ecosystem.

Claude? no.

Omarchy? yep.

You mean like slack did?

Less context switching for current workers. For new ones, they might not need those other accounts in the future.

And why share data when you can own it?

Lock in: make the product have enough features and user only network effects that companies have to get everyone a Claude seat and sign up for enterprise.

> When you’re done brainstorming ... where you can continue working on it with your team.

Yeah, if we're done working on it, why are we continuing to work on it? That makes no sense.

And what company is going to hand over all their data to Anthropic without proper controls, regulatory compliance, sovereignty rules and customer managed encryption and isolation? Could it happen, yes. Will it happen quickly, no.

Lol, not it's not.

No company that need that level of data ingest and analysis is using Anthropic's tooling over something that is used industry wide.

I don't think they have a proven history of abandoning projects yet. Why would they when the tools they build (agents) can dramatically reduce the costs of maintaining and improving projects?

They'll just ignore any user complaints about them being broken or expensive. Anthropic support is bad.

"better" as in better for the customer, not better for Anthropic :)

Reality is, the crazy valuation given to frontier labs will push them to capture more of the value chain, to make it harder for customers to switch models. Having a best-in-class model is not defensible, long term.

If their valuation is justified, they WILL disrupt every SaaS worth disrupting where most of the value is in the first S. There isn't enough money in selling a commodity.