And that would create a flood of new users who, while putting a fair bit of pressure on Airtable’s infrastructure, would also likely result in a number of new tire kickers and a sizeable injection of new paying users - rinse, repeat (exponentially).
Indeed, it’s how they could grow their business rapidly, well - at least their user base. But this idea comes at a cost - the infrastructure would take a hit and if it’s not ready for prime-time, my service will degrade as a result of your new collaborative-user windfall. I’m sure this is in their calculous of trade-offs.
You’ve probably noticed that Comcast doesn’t perform this calculous. When five new families each with five iPhone-carrying kids move into the neighborhood and start sucking on the Internet pipe, all y’alls are faced with really slow load times and streaming interruptions. Airtable probably doesn’t want to be that company, and neither do we.
The fact that there’s a practical ceiling on records suggests they’re not ready for prime-time, and despite perhaps wanting to do exactly what you suggest, they are simply unable or unprepared to do it for any number of technical reasons [at this time].
I don’t want to necessarily defend this posture by Airtable or even suggest I know or I’m speaking for them. But I suspect they’re holding the reigns pretty tight because they don’t want to risk the brand equity of their pretty thrilled [existing] user base.
