9 ms·

Microsoft Loop Preview

107 points by vyrotek 4y ago

galkk 4y ago
That could work nicely, as managing things like shared family tasks is tedious in OneNote and me/wife weren't able to utilize Asana for that due to strict task limitations. I could never go past Notion's start screen
- coffeeling 4y ago
  Shared task lists in To Do?
petilon 4y ago
Looks like they are copying Notion. A lot of things have changed at Microsoft under Satya Nadella. One thing that hasn't changed is their inability to create anything original.
- rejectfinite 4y ago
  This was announced years ago. Is every FPS a Doom clone? Every wiki a wikimedia copy? Every browser a copy of Mosiac?
  - shiftpgdn 4y ago
    This looks like a parity to Notion's feature set. Chrome wasn't a copy of Internet Explorer because it was a great leap forward in web browsers. Call of Duty isn't a doom clone because it has a storyline and semi-realistic weapons and graphics.
    - louhike 4y ago
      You could say that Call of Duty was a clone of Medal of Honor though. And comparing Chrome with Firefox at the time might be more fair too.
      - lghh 4y ago
        Okay. Then Medal of Honor wasn't a DOOM clone.
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    The market shifted toward more FPS games because of Doom, yes. But also, modern FPS games don't copy Doom slavishly. Initially browsers were, in fact, copies of Mosaic, but over time they've branched out somewhat. This seems note-for-note to be a copy of Notion, not just conceptually. It's a product designed so a sales team can tell customers: you can cancel your Notion contract and just add this low-cost option to your existing Office 365 subscription!
  - stevefan1999 4y ago
    Sorry but I would replace Doom with Wolfenstein: Is every FPS a Wolfenstein clone?
- _fat_santa 4y ago
  Not just at MSFT, seems that the entire industry is headed in that one direction. It seems now you have 1-2 true innovators in the industry and then a littany of copycats. Short form video is probably the shining example of this. TikTok was first to make the innovation (technically Vine), and then everyone copied them verbatim from there (Reels, YT Shorts, Whatver the hell FB is doing, Twitter). Sometimes this copying has a positive effect like when Twitter copied Clubhouse with Spaces, but often times it just ends up being half assed versions of the thing that was initially popular/innovative.
  - petilon 4y ago
    You expect trillion-dollar companies to contribute to society by occasionally doing some original work. Instead, they suck the oxygen out of the room by copying market-successful ideas, thereby stifling innovators.
    - rektide 4y ago
      There's alot of naysaying against selfhosting & p2p, saying people don't care about that stuff. But to me the clear advantage is having malleable systems & protocols. It's the ability for folks to try different things, to change the products or make new products that interoperate. Being dependent on so few to provide all the "innovation" & leaving everyone else as consumer to that provided "innovation" feels like a broken system.
- princevegeta89 4y ago
  VS Code, WSL, open-sourcing .NET framework?
  - devmunchies 4y ago
    VS Code was a copycat of Atom. Dotnet copied Java. I use and enjoy my microsoft stack (F#, Github, Azure, etc) but they definitely aren't "original". It's like they built a nice large city where it's pleasant to live, but lacks the charm of a more intimate town.
    - princevegeta89 4y ago
      I wouldn't call VSCode a copycat of atom. It was completely rethought editor built for extensibility and flexibility that brought the huge ass community together to contribute to it. The remote container support is a major innovation. No other IDE supports it so well even to this day. Atom is a slow ass editor that was copied from Sublime Text but also failed to fix its own shit which was the reason it died.
      - nemothekid 4y ago
        >I wouldn't call VSCode a copycat of atom. C'mon, Electron was literally built for atom. They took the literally framework atom was running on and built a me-too editor
        princevegeta89 4y ago
        Agreed, but the metoo editor still has had so many unique features vs atom though
    - _lhb8 4y ago
      And the iPhone copied the BlackBerry. Nothing is original. Everything is inspired by something.
      - 4y ago
nathanm412 4y ago
It kind of reminds me of what Google Wave promised to be.
rejectfinite 4y ago
This looks great but the whole Office 365 suite is loaded with apps. So now for projects there is Teams, Planner, Project, Tasks, To-Do and now Loop? I guess Loop is like a wiki/documentation and a planner/tasks app rolled into one. And then Teams for chats and meetings? I WORK in 365 all day, and I'm confused!
- Multicomp 4y ago
  1. outlook has tasks 2. onenote has tasks 3. ms todo has tasks 4. ms project has tasks but is for heavyweight full time project mangers, not tasks like the rest of these which are more like knowledge management action items 5. IDK about MS planner 6. MS loop is an enumeration of teams's groups + todo tasks + other integrations squeezed into a single UI by doing integrations, like in the old OLE days (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding) AFAICT, while leaving actual chats / meets to teams as you said
  - atrain101 4y ago
    I think Planner is on death's door for Microsoft. Rumor has it that most of the development team is now working on Project.
  - sebazzz 4y ago
    I know MS Todo also aggregrates the Outlook tasks/flags.
- tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  Soon, Office Xbox 360 Series is where you will spend your break periods, for your health and also future leveraging of the "gamification" concept. Your call center is now a literal AI-integrated game in Xbox, with achievements. Play Recruiter Storm with new LinkedIn Live, and also Uber Crazy Taxi with real-time payout support from Microsoft Pay.
_fat_santa 4y ago
That hero image makes it looks like a carbon copy of notion. Seems that Microsoft's "business productivity strategy" is to create a walled garden of apps that do what mainstream apps do. You don't need to sign up for Slack because we have Teams, you don't need to signup for Notion because we have Loop. If I had to predict, Loop will turn out to be an inferior app to Notion just like Teams turned out to be inferior to Slack, though it will still have wide adoption because it's bundled in.
- rejectfinite 4y ago
  >You don't need to sign up for Slack because we have Teams, you don't need to signup for Notion because we have Loop Yes? Why should a company pay for Slack, Office 365 and Notion? When you can just pay for one Office 365 licence per user? This also makes sure data is in your tenant and not spread all the fuck over. Say Susie quits. Now all her stuff is in Slack, Notion, Office 365 and a Google account. VS it being all in one Office 365 account under one admin panel.
  - ProAm 4y ago
    The only benefit is its a little cheaper and less contracts to maintain but Teams so significantly inferior to Slack/Zoom. The only reason we continue to use it is because of cost savings.
    - AraceliHarker 4y ago
      Exactly this. GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34773860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34773860
    - dash2 4y ago
      Cost is one of the attributes of a product.
    - ramesh31 4y ago
      >The only benefit is its a little cheaper and less contracts to maintain but Teams so significantly inferior to Slack/Zoom. It's a lot cheaper. Slack contracts can easily run into the millions per year for a large org, versus... free.
thiscatis 4y ago
So Notion x ClickUp but part of your office license?
conqrr 4y ago
Microsoft teaches a powerful lesson. Being no 2 and diversified can be much better than being no 1 and no diversification for large tech businesses. Its perhaps the most diversified tech business and isn't the best in a single product but has an offering for every product you can imagine for enterprises - Cloud offering, Office suite, CRM, Productivity suite etc.
- rejectfinite 4y ago
  >and isn't the best in a single product Managing a Windows OS vs MacOS and Linux? Active Directory, GPO, Intune etc. Jamf for Mac comes close. And interoperability is a feature between the apps (somewhat) It used to be way worse.
  - CWuestefeld 4y ago
    Also... SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) is head and shoulders above any other such tool I've ever seen. I'm not sure we can say that Office is clearly superior, but at the very least there's no competitor that can claim to be better. Office remains the standard to which others are compared. There are so many/different shell scripting platforms that it's impossible to really compare, but you can make a reasonable argument for PowerShell. Taken as a whole, Azure is in 2nd place popularity-wise. But comparing service-for-service across the big three, there are certainly individual services where MS's offering is superior.
- ren_engineer 4y ago
  "good enough" works for most use cases and the added convenience of not having to juggle a bunch of vendors is a bonus. This is classic horizontal vs vertical integration. Unless the service is absolutely critical for what you do, you don't need best in class
- wakeupcall 4y ago
  They can afford to do that because they have an entrenched quasi-monopoly in the public/enterprise desktop sector. You'll have to get office and windows at the very least, so why not include the license to all the other remaining products? The volume licensing deals make it very attractive even if you don't plan to use any of the other microsoft offerings. In fact, microsoft will still gain in marketshare alone even giving all those licenses out for free. The net result for large orgs is that if you request a product, and microsoft has some bundled one that looks similar, your purchasing request gets automatically denied. It almost doesn't matter how much better the alternative is for your use case (or, more often, the other way around: how much worse the microsoft product is). It's an excellent strategy, indeed.
tikkun 4y ago
Notion x Clickup x Threads Looks nice though!
- guiriduro 4y ago
  Nice? That landing page is My Little Pony meets acid trip.
  - precompute 4y ago
    That's the current design trend mixed with microsoft's horrible design language.
sambroner 4y ago
While this does look like a clone of Notion and I'm frustrated this took SIX (!!) years to ship, I'm unbelievably proud to see this out in public. I was working on this in November of 2017, when we demoed collaborative canvases built with what's now the Fluid Framework to Satya. In fact, I turned down an early job with LimeBike after Steve Lucco let me demo a collaborative YouTube player to to BillG. A huge congratulations to the team and amazing work on the product. I'm excited to see what comes next. A few thoughts... 1. The Autonomous Agent/AI stuff has been deep in the Loop/Fluid Framework/Project Prague DNA since the beginning. The 2019 demos to the exec team included "Bindy" (Clippy's smarter sister), which was an intelligent agent that could live translate, spell check, insert content, and more. This demo [1] from Build 2019 includes some of that sauce with the live translate demo (and me back stage operating part of the Teams integration) 2. A huge part of the technical problems with Loop was building a secure launcher like OLE, that worked across Office on Web and Native. In fact, it seems like the M365 AI CoPilot is built on the same technology, which would make sense as you need a way to securely add another collaborator (the AI) and additional cross-plat & cross-app logic. 3. Working on cross app components like Loop and with CRDTs/OT really gets the imagination going. Especially because we were (at the time) very excited about 3rd party components like Asana, SalesForce, or Grammarly. Ideally these could be combined gracefully a la Semantic Web. It'd be so powerful to allow users to modify web pages, combine data sources, and generally own their own environment so they can design their own tools. Geoffrey Litt recently summarized how AI could unlock this future [2]. I also spent time in crypto with the hope it could unlock this future (by incentivizing people to adopt shared protocols). Loop & Microsoft could also allow centralize enough developer mindshare to unlock part of this vision. (Perhaps more effectively than Code Packs?) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMzXmkrlFNg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMzXmkrlFNg [2] https://twitter.com/geoffreylitt/status/1637592619269214209 https://twitter.com/geoffreylitt/status/1637592619269214209
- elcritch 4y ago
  Could you elaborate on how you can use CRDTs/OT for cross app components? It sounds intriguing but its unclear how they help vs a common api like activity pub?
  - 4y ago
CSMastermind 4y ago
I'm uninformed and have never used Notion - does this replace OneNote?
- Multicomp 4y ago
  I've never used notion either. AFAIK OneNote is still being actively developed, it recently got an office 2021 release after the long dark onenote 2016 vs onenote for windows 10 (two onenotes?!) winter...finally a desktop onenote application with all black theme and dictation! I hope this does not replace or eat onenote development resources in the future.
  - coffeeling 4y ago
    OneNote development is aimed mostly at education features, sadly, not for us normal office rats.
    - pqs 4y ago
      At my office we started to use OneNote and ToDo in January. I hope there is a way to import everything or, at least, a way to integrate then well.
- atrain101 4y ago
  Loop isn't meant to replace OneNote. You can bring loop components into your OneNote pages though.
albert_e 4y ago
Loop was in the making for at least 2-3 years now inlcuding the publicly known product name Seems rather long for a preview launch finally
- atrain101 4y ago
  Loop components have been available in Teams and Outlook for nearly a year. Today's announcement is mostly about letting users access the proper web app.
rektide 4y ago
Do products like this have user-facing APIs or no? I keep meaning to go explore but doesn't software like Notion also have a lot of internal script-ability? I'm interested to see what programmatic offerings this exposes.
vivegi 4y ago
Reminds me of 37signals' Basecamp. I am keen to see their OpenAI integration within Loop to collaboratively work on document drafts - from concept to tweaking to review/approval and finalization.
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
And they said Google Wave was crazy and ppl didn't get it like 10+ years ago.....
- ChickeNES 4y ago
  Yeah I have no idea what Notion is and when I opened the Loop page I literally said aloud "Isn't this just Google Wave?"
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    I'd be very curious to see a comparison of Notion and similar collaboration tools with Wave.
  - sophiabits 4y ago
    Wave was so far ahead of its time, it’s almost unbelievable
fakename 4y ago
Getting this error constantly: "We couldn't save the Loop page you've created. It will be lost as soon as you refresh. Copy anything you want to keep and paste it somewhere else. Then, please try creating the page again."
rejectfinite 4y ago
Here is how to manage this now for other Office 365 admins that are looking. Seems like you need to create a group and enable it for the org/tenant for now as it is a preview. Some customers might want this enabled... https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/learn-how-to-enable-the-microsoft-loop-app-now-in-public-preview/ba-p/3769013 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/le... https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/manage-loop-components https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/manage-loop-com...
square_usual 4y ago
People are saying this is a notion clone, but as someone who used Notion quite a bit and just got access to Loop, this is nowhere near as good as Notion. The point of Notion is that you can build your own workflow in it via databases and pages. That is the use case Notion targets most heavily - they invest in community ambassadors who help people figure out how to build workflows, their advertising strategy is about it, etc. And this strategy works for small companies and startups which don't want to or need to invest in big, heavy solutions like Jira. Loop doesn't have that. As it stands, it seems to me more like a better Confluence - it looks great for docs (but no code blocks? Wtf MS? Why couldn't you just do markdown?!), but it can't replace Notion for what I (and some startups that I know use Notion) for my day to day work.
- guiambros 4y ago
  100x this. No LaTeX, no code blocks, no databases, no workflow or scripting, no markdown support (which makes porting content to/from Loop very painful). This is not a clone of Notion; it's a clone of Evernote mixed with Atlassian Confluence.. Maybe it'll eventually evolve and become a real competitor to Notion/Obsidian, but it seems to be targeting a different type of user. Also remember that Microsoft still offers SharePoint, so they have a vested interest in not disrupting the workflow automation space.
CrypticShift 4y ago
So many are saying this is a rip-off of Notion. what is Notion? If Notion as a powerful Wiki+DB combo, then this is not a copy at all. If Notion as a slick block-based wiki, then this is so general a category I do not consider copying it a "copy". It is just being in the "wiki category". I'm more interested in how two innovations are going to address the 2 main problems with wikis in business : - The first is updating content. With the loop "components" you don't have to remind yourself to be on the wiki anymore. You edit in chats (teams), mails, or documents, and the wiki is updated. How cool is that? - The second is finding content. The "Business Chat" co-pilot is even a step ahead of “classic” semantic search. This is gonna make finding what you need in large loop wikis a lot easier.
amitonquest 4y ago
Doesnt support markdown, so no longer a notion killer for me!! I cant imagine how can they release this without md support!!

107 points by vyrotek 4y ago

That could work nicely, as managing things like shared family tasks is tedious in OneNote and me/wife weren't able to utilize Asana for that due to strict task limitations. I could never go past Notion's start screen

coffeeling 4y ago
Shared task lists in To Do?

petilon 4y ago

Looks like they are copying Notion. A lot of things have changed at Microsoft under Satya Nadella. One thing that hasn't changed is their inability to create anything original.

rejectfinite 4y ago
This was announced years ago. Is every FPS a Doom clone? Every wiki a wikimedia copy? Every browser a copy of Mosiac?
- shiftpgdn 4y ago
  This looks like a parity to Notion's feature set. Chrome wasn't a copy of Internet Explorer because it was a great leap forward in web browsers. Call of Duty isn't a doom clone because it has a storyline and semi-realistic weapons and graphics.
  - louhike 4y ago
    You could say that Call of Duty was a clone of Medal of Honor though. And comparing Chrome with Firefox at the time might be more fair too.
    - lghh 4y ago
      Okay. Then Medal of Honor wasn't a DOOM clone.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  The market shifted toward more FPS games because of Doom, yes. But also, modern FPS games don't copy Doom slavishly. Initially browsers were, in fact, copies of Mosaic, but over time they've branched out somewhat. This seems note-for-note to be a copy of Notion, not just conceptually. It's a product designed so a sales team can tell customers: you can cancel your Notion contract and just add this low-cost option to your existing Office 365 subscription!
- stevefan1999 4y ago
  Sorry but I would replace Doom with Wolfenstein: Is every FPS a Wolfenstein clone?
_fat_santa 4y ago
Not just at MSFT, seems that the entire industry is headed in that one direction. It seems now you have 1-2 true innovators in the industry and then a littany of copycats. Short form video is probably the shining example of this. TikTok was first to make the innovation (technically Vine), and then everyone copied them verbatim from there (Reels, YT Shorts, Whatver the hell FB is doing, Twitter). Sometimes this copying has a positive effect like when Twitter copied Clubhouse with Spaces, but often times it just ends up being half assed versions of the thing that was initially popular/innovative.
- petilon 4y ago
  You expect trillion-dollar companies to contribute to society by occasionally doing some original work. Instead, they suck the oxygen out of the room by copying market-successful ideas, thereby stifling innovators.
  - rektide 4y ago
    There's alot of naysaying against selfhosting & p2p, saying people don't care about that stuff. But to me the clear advantage is having malleable systems & protocols. It's the ability for folks to try different things, to change the products or make new products that interoperate. Being dependent on so few to provide all the "innovation" & leaving everyone else as consumer to that provided "innovation" feels like a broken system.
princevegeta89 4y ago
VS Code, WSL, open-sourcing .NET framework?
- devmunchies 4y ago
  VS Code was a copycat of Atom. Dotnet copied Java. I use and enjoy my microsoft stack (F#, Github, Azure, etc) but they definitely aren't "original". It's like they built a nice large city where it's pleasant to live, but lacks the charm of a more intimate town.
  - princevegeta89 4y ago
    I wouldn't call VSCode a copycat of atom. It was completely rethought editor built for extensibility and flexibility that brought the huge ass community together to contribute to it. The remote container support is a major innovation. No other IDE supports it so well even to this day. Atom is a slow ass editor that was copied from Sublime Text but also failed to fix its own shit which was the reason it died.
    - nemothekid 4y ago
      >I wouldn't call VSCode a copycat of atom. C'mon, Electron was literally built for atom. They took the literally framework atom was running on and built a me-too editor
      - princevegeta89 4y ago
        Agreed, but the metoo editor still has had so many unique features vs atom though
  - _lhb8 4y ago
    And the iPhone copied the BlackBerry. Nothing is original. Everything is inspired by something.
    - 4y ago

nathanm412 4y ago

It kind of reminds me of what Google Wave promised to be.

rejectfinite 4y ago

This looks great but the whole Office 365 suite is loaded with apps. So now for projects there is Teams, Planner, Project, Tasks, To-Do and now Loop? I guess Loop is like a wiki/documentation and a planner/tasks app rolled into one. And then Teams for chats and meetings? I WORK in 365 all day, and I'm confused!

Multicomp 4y ago
1. outlook has tasks 2. onenote has tasks 3. ms todo has tasks 4. ms project has tasks but is for heavyweight full time project mangers, not tasks like the rest of these which are more like knowledge management action items 5. IDK about MS planner 6. MS loop is an enumeration of teams's groups + todo tasks + other integrations squeezed into a single UI by doing integrations, like in the old OLE days (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding) AFAICT, while leaving actual chats / meets to teams as you said
- atrain101 4y ago
  I think Planner is on death's door for Microsoft. Rumor has it that most of the development team is now working on Project.
- sebazzz 4y ago
  I know MS Todo also aggregrates the Outlook tasks/flags.
tenebrisalietum 4y ago
Soon, Office Xbox 360 Series is where you will spend your break periods, for your health and also future leveraging of the "gamification" concept. Your call center is now a literal AI-integrated game in Xbox, with achievements. Play Recruiter Storm with new LinkedIn Live, and also Uber Crazy Taxi with real-time payout support from Microsoft Pay.

_fat_santa 4y ago

That hero image makes it looks like a carbon copy of notion. Seems that Microsoft's "business productivity strategy" is to create a walled garden of apps that do what mainstream apps do. You don't need to sign up for Slack because we have Teams, you don't need to signup for Notion because we have Loop. If I had to predict, Loop will turn out to be an inferior app to Notion just like Teams turned out to be inferior to Slack, though it will still have wide adoption because it's bundled in.

rejectfinite 4y ago
>You don't need to sign up for Slack because we have Teams, you don't need to signup for Notion because we have Loop Yes? Why should a company pay for Slack, Office 365 and Notion? When you can just pay for one Office 365 licence per user? This also makes sure data is in your tenant and not spread all the fuck over. Say Susie quits. Now all her stuff is in Slack, Notion, Office 365 and a Google account. VS it being all in one Office 365 account under one admin panel.
- ProAm 4y ago
  The only benefit is its a little cheaper and less contracts to maintain but Teams so significantly inferior to Slack/Zoom. The only reason we continue to use it is because of cost savings.
  - AraceliHarker 4y ago
    Exactly this. GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34773860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34773860
  - dash2 4y ago
    Cost is one of the attributes of a product.
  - ramesh31 4y ago
    >The only benefit is its a little cheaper and less contracts to maintain but Teams so significantly inferior to Slack/Zoom. It's a lot cheaper. Slack contracts can easily run into the millions per year for a large org, versus... free.

thiscatis 4y ago

So Notion x ClickUp but part of your office license?

conqrr 4y ago

Microsoft teaches a powerful lesson. Being no 2 and diversified can be much better than being no 1 and no diversification for large tech businesses. Its perhaps the most diversified tech business and isn't the best in a single product but has an offering for every product you can imagine for enterprises - Cloud offering, Office suite, CRM, Productivity suite etc.

rejectfinite 4y ago
>and isn't the best in a single product Managing a Windows OS vs MacOS and Linux? Active Directory, GPO, Intune etc. Jamf for Mac comes close. And interoperability is a feature between the apps (somewhat) It used to be way worse.
- CWuestefeld 4y ago
  Also... SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) is head and shoulders above any other such tool I've ever seen. I'm not sure we can say that Office is clearly superior, but at the very least there's no competitor that can claim to be better. Office remains the standard to which others are compared. There are so many/different shell scripting platforms that it's impossible to really compare, but you can make a reasonable argument for PowerShell. Taken as a whole, Azure is in 2nd place popularity-wise. But comparing service-for-service across the big three, there are certainly individual services where MS's offering is superior.
ren_engineer 4y ago
"good enough" works for most use cases and the added convenience of not having to juggle a bunch of vendors is a bonus. This is classic horizontal vs vertical integration. Unless the service is absolutely critical for what you do, you don't need best in class
wakeupcall 4y ago
They can afford to do that because they have an entrenched quasi-monopoly in the public/enterprise desktop sector. You'll have to get office and windows at the very least, so why not include the license to all the other remaining products? The volume licensing deals make it very attractive even if you don't plan to use any of the other microsoft offerings. In fact, microsoft will still gain in marketshare alone even giving all those licenses out for free. The net result for large orgs is that if you request a product, and microsoft has some bundled one that looks similar, your purchasing request gets automatically denied. It almost doesn't matter how much better the alternative is for your use case (or, more often, the other way around: how much worse the microsoft product is). It's an excellent strategy, indeed.

tikkun 4y ago

Notion x Clickup x Threads Looks nice though!

guiriduro 4y ago
Nice? That landing page is My Little Pony meets acid trip.
- precompute 4y ago
  That's the current design trend mixed with microsoft's horrible design language.

sambroner 4y ago

While this does look like a clone of Notion and I'm frustrated this took SIX (!!) years to ship, I'm unbelievably proud to see this out in public. I was working on this in November of 2017, when we demoed collaborative canvases built with what's now the Fluid Framework to Satya. In fact, I turned down an early job with LimeBike after Steve Lucco let me demo a collaborative YouTube player to to BillG. A huge congratulations to the team and amazing work on the product. I'm excited to see what comes next. A few thoughts... 1. The Autonomous Agent/AI stuff has been deep in the Loop/Fluid Framework/Project Prague DNA since the beginning. The 2019 demos to the exec team included "Bindy" (Clippy's smarter sister), which was an intelligent agent that could live translate, spell check, insert content, and more. This demo [1] from Build 2019 includes some of that sauce with the live translate demo (and me back stage operating part of the Teams integration) 2. A huge part of the technical problems with Loop was building a secure launcher like OLE, that worked across Office on Web and Native. In fact, it seems like the M365 AI CoPilot is built on the same technology, which would make sense as you need a way to securely add another collaborator (the AI) and additional cross-plat & cross-app logic. 3. Working on cross app components like Loop and with CRDTs/OT really gets the imagination going. Especially because we were (at the time) very excited about 3rd party components like Asana, SalesForce, or Grammarly. Ideally these could be combined gracefully a la Semantic Web. It'd be so powerful to allow users to modify web pages, combine data sources, and generally own their own environment so they can design their own tools. Geoffrey Litt recently summarized how AI could unlock this future [2]. I also spent time in crypto with the hope it could unlock this future (by incentivizing people to adopt shared protocols). Loop & Microsoft could also allow centralize enough developer mindshare to unlock part of this vision. (Perhaps more effectively than Code Packs?) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMzXmkrlFNg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMzXmkrlFNg [2] https://twitter.com/geoffreylitt/status/1637592619269214209 https://twitter.com/geoffreylitt/status/1637592619269214209

elcritch 4y ago
Could you elaborate on how you can use CRDTs/OT for cross app components? It sounds intriguing but its unclear how they help vs a common api like activity pub?
- 4y ago

CSMastermind 4y ago

I'm uninformed and have never used Notion - does this replace OneNote?

Multicomp 4y ago
I've never used notion either. AFAIK OneNote is still being actively developed, it recently got an office 2021 release after the long dark onenote 2016 vs onenote for windows 10 (two onenotes?!) winter...finally a desktop onenote application with all black theme and dictation! I hope this does not replace or eat onenote development resources in the future.
- coffeeling 4y ago
  OneNote development is aimed mostly at education features, sadly, not for us normal office rats.
  - pqs 4y ago
    At my office we started to use OneNote and ToDo in January. I hope there is a way to import everything or, at least, a way to integrate then well.
atrain101 4y ago
Loop isn't meant to replace OneNote. You can bring loop components into your OneNote pages though.

albert_e 4y ago

Loop was in the making for at least 2-3 years now inlcuding the publicly known product name Seems rather long for a preview launch finally

atrain101 4y ago
Loop components have been available in Teams and Outlook for nearly a year. Today's announcement is mostly about letting users access the proper web app.

rektide 4y ago

Do products like this have user-facing APIs or no? I keep meaning to go explore but doesn't software like Notion also have a lot of internal script-ability? I'm interested to see what programmatic offerings this exposes.

vivegi 4y ago

Reminds me of 37signals' Basecamp. I am keen to see their OpenAI integration within Loop to collaboratively work on document drafts - from concept to tweaking to review/approval and finalization.

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

And they said Google Wave was crazy and ppl didn't get it like 10+ years ago.....

ChickeNES 4y ago
Yeah I have no idea what Notion is and when I opened the Loop page I literally said aloud "Isn't this just Google Wave?"
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  I'd be very curious to see a comparison of Notion and similar collaboration tools with Wave.
- sophiabits 4y ago
  Wave was so far ahead of its time, it’s almost unbelievable

fakename 4y ago

Getting this error constantly: "We couldn't save the Loop page you've created. It will be lost as soon as you refresh. Copy anything you want to keep and paste it somewhere else. Then, please try creating the page again."

rejectfinite 4y ago

Here is how to manage this now for other Office 365 admins that are looking. Seems like you need to create a group and enable it for the org/tenant for now as it is a preview. Some customers might want this enabled... https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/learn-how-to-enable-the-microsoft-loop-app-now-in-public-preview/ba-p/3769013 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/le... https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/manage-loop-components https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/manage-loop-com...

square_usual 4y ago

People are saying this is a notion clone, but as someone who used Notion quite a bit and just got access to Loop, this is nowhere near as good as Notion. The point of Notion is that you can build your own workflow in it via databases and pages. That is the use case Notion targets most heavily - they invest in community ambassadors who help people figure out how to build workflows, their advertising strategy is about it, etc. And this strategy works for small companies and startups which don't want to or need to invest in big, heavy solutions like Jira. Loop doesn't have that. As it stands, it seems to me more like a better Confluence - it looks great for docs (but no code blocks? Wtf MS? Why couldn't you just do markdown?!), but it can't replace Notion for what I (and some startups that I know use Notion) for my day to day work.

guiambros 4y ago
100x this. No LaTeX, no code blocks, no databases, no workflow or scripting, no markdown support (which makes porting content to/from Loop very painful). This is not a clone of Notion; it's a clone of Evernote mixed with Atlassian Confluence.. Maybe it'll eventually evolve and become a real competitor to Notion/Obsidian, but it seems to be targeting a different type of user. Also remember that Microsoft still offers SharePoint, so they have a vested interest in not disrupting the workflow automation space.

CrypticShift 4y ago

So many are saying this is a rip-off of Notion. what is Notion? If Notion as a powerful Wiki+DB combo, then this is not a copy at all. If Notion as a slick block-based wiki, then this is so general a category I do not consider copying it a "copy". It is just being in the "wiki category". I'm more interested in how two innovations are going to address the 2 main problems with wikis in business : - The first is updating content. With the loop "components" you don't have to remind yourself to be on the wiki anymore. You edit in chats (teams), mails, or documents, and the wiki is updated. How cool is that? - The second is finding content. The "Business Chat" co-pilot is even a step ahead of “classic” semantic search. This is gonna make finding what you need in large loop wikis a lot easier.

amitonquest 4y ago

Doesnt support markdown, so no longer a notion killer for me!! I cant imagine how can they release this without md support!!