Microsoft (and, similarly, Amazon) will beat them on price, this much is certain. Microsoft will beat nearly anything on price. They'll also win on integration points, and they'll win on it already being part of the package.
But, they rarely win on performance or features. Those are the verticals you need to hope are critical. In many product domains, actually, these doesn't matter. Microsoft wouldn't be in the dominant position they're in if performance mattered.
I'll say right now: some of the integration points they've shown here, where you can create line-of-business apps that embed directly into Teams, that is going to play so freakin well in sales conversations. Airtable has nothing like that. We don't run any Microsoft services at all at our company, and I want that specific thing; I'd rather it be Airtable inside of Slack, but there are way, way more companies out there who would rather it be Lists in Teams than anything to do with Airtable and Slack.
Airtable is $20/seat/mo on the pro tier (unlocks all the features) for a great UX but comes with harsh restrictions on table size and no webhooks for change data. I'm sure someone can beat them on price. For comparison, the entirety of GSuite is $12/seat/mo for the same tier.
That line of thinking holds up on the personal level—I, as well as many other HN readers I assume, care about it—but at the enterprise level, it won't play at all.
If Gsuite is significantly cheaper, has decent feature parity, and has the name of (one of) the biggest tech companies in the world behind it, it has already won 90% of the sales conversation for enterprise buyers.
I will use this immediately. I loved Airtable, but the pricing was a non starter for our business. We already have office635, and we’re likely to use this all over the place.
But, they rarely win on performance or features. Those are the verticals you need to hope are critical. In many product domains, actually, these doesn't matter. Microsoft wouldn't be in the dominant position they're in if performance mattered.
I'll say right now: some of the integration points they've shown here, where you can create line-of-business apps that embed directly into Teams, that is going to play so freakin well in sales conversations. Airtable has nothing like that. We don't run any Microsoft services at all at our company, and I want that specific thing; I'd rather it be Airtable inside of Slack, but there are way, way more companies out there who would rather it be Lists in Teams than anything to do with Airtable and Slack.