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Microsoft Loop brings back Google Wave?
- sergiomattei 5y agoThat product doesn't look like Wave. It's a shockingly shameless clone of Notion.
- hellomyguys 5y agoAnd Notion is a better clone of Quip.
- azinman2 5y agoWhich is a clone of Confluence, which is a clone of any wiki software.
- skeeter2020 5y agocan you really clone a broad category? Wouldn't we just call that an alternative implementation?
- e12e 5y agoIsn't SharePoint a clone of lotus notes (without any of the cool parts)?
- anaisbetts 5y agoAnd both are a shameless clone of Microsoft Sharepoint - it all comes full circle
- tims33 5y agoWhich was built to combat Lotus Notes
- 2pointsomone 5y agoCan we stop putting any of these product ideas on pedestals, as if they were acts of technological genius? They are all incremental interesting improvements, often thought of around the same years with unique insights, but not some revolutionary inventions no one has tried to build before. They are what they are because of their execution.
- sergiomattei 5y agoI'm referring to design.
- chrisfrantz 5y agoRelevant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29083014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29083014
- AlanYx 5y agoThe interface looks much more similar to Notion than Google Wave; I don't see the similarity to Wave.
- gigel82 5y agoWhich looks like Quip, which looks like OneNote, which looks like a million other note-taking apps before it. I think the more interesting aspect is the extreme coauthoring; it looks like the underlying tech is open source as well which is pretty interesting for a lot of applications: https://github.com/microsoft/FluidFramework https://github.com/microsoft/FluidFramework
- AlanYx 5y agoThe similarity seems more than skin deep though; the "Loop components" data model as it's described in the linked article sounds similar to the underlying data model in Notion. Notion doesn't have the multi-cursor live coauthoring feature though; that's new. Do you know if the Fluid Framework is built on top of CRDTs?
- gigel82 5y agoDidn't do a deep dive, but it looks like they have distributed data structures (DDSes) on that layer, which appear different to CRDTs (merging on the client, not on the server). I can imagine someone could build a multiplayer game on this thing (though I doubt that's what MS designed for).
- WorldMaker 5y agoFrom what I recall of a BUILD talk once on the deep dive fundamentals, Fluid is based on CRDTs under the hood (or possibly the CRDT predecessor OT like Wave was), but Fluid believes writing CRDTs is hard (it is), especially writing them that obey the math laws CRDTs are supposed to, and then getting that to perform well (including and especially things like catch-up/replay) is also hard, so yes the actual programming interface Fluid presents is high level "distributed data structures" though the wire format is closer to CRDTs with some cheats from assumed knowledge of the data structures (things like sending the latest contents of a list for catch-up rather than replaying the entire CRDT chain for that list).
- depaya 5y agoI was a heavy user of Wave for the brief period of time it existed. Although I struggle to think of how I will integrate this into my workflow today, I am excited to give it a try.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoWave was perfect for summer specific processes, like development of a tech specifications or making a complex contracts. Collapsing branches were much more usable than comments in Google Docs: you can't have a lengthy discussion in Docs, but in Wave it was natural. Still, the team has to be disciplined, or else Wave quickly became chaotic.
- frankfrankfrank 5y agoIt's a bit of a shallow perspective to say that Google shut down Wave. Sure, they shut down the branding and distinct feature that was called wave, but it was essentially just the experimentation environment for synchronous editing that was then deeply integrated into the rest of the GSuite. It didn't die, it just went through metamorphosis.
- noja 5y agoGoogle Wave was sold to us as a better replacement for e-mail. That was its main feature! It definitely died. Sure they took some of the pieces and reused them in other products, but Wave definitely died.
- blowski 5y ago10 years ago, I collaborated on Word docs by making changes and emailing it back. We’d look at revision histories to keep track. Now the only email is the one that gives the link to the online document.
- shapefrog 5y agoAnd I was the person who had to merge two peoples work if they both made changes on the same day with the 'master' copy. Sometimes I wonder how we got out of that era alive.
- snewman 5y agoDo you have a source for this? I don't think it played out that way. Google Docs and Sheets both had synchronous editing before Wave launched. At some point Docs was rewritten to use the underlying mechanism from Sheets. I'm not aware of any cross-pollination from Wave. The Docs and Sheets teams were fairly closely connected; Wave was developed in an entirely separate part of the organization, I believe the team was mostly in Australia, and there was never much communication AFAIK. (Source: I was co-author of the original Google Docs implementation aka Writely; had some visibility into later iterations. I left Google in 2010 but have some idea of what went on subsequently.)
- endisneigh 5y agoSerious question, has anyone ever used a collab product in the way described (3 cursors and several people typing)?
- indiantinker 5y agoI think I experienced it with Google Docs once. So much context switching happens until you cannot switch contexts anymore. Then you are just numb.
- judge2020 5y agoOften in Google Docs and Notion, however usually it's in separate sections of a document. I've never seen three people writing different points on the same bullet list - sounds like it would result in an inconsistent writing style or conflicting information.
- flakiness 5y agoWe use it for meeting agenda / notes. The note taker takes the note, while other people queue up the topics to talk about next. I'm not suggesting this is the best way to take the meeting note and I'm happy to hear about the alternatives, but it is reasonably usable. It doesn't look gorgeous either. People wouldn't like to distract the meeting through the doc, which is projected to the large screen in front of everyone.
- topkai22 5y agoNo, but as others have said I've seen it with multiple people in different parts of the same document. Demoing 3 cursors on screen at the same time expresses the capability of the product in a couple seconds, explaining how you should actual use it would have taken longer and killed flow.
- binbag 5y agoYes, in my company some of the fastest proposal writing has been done during lockdown as 3-4 people co-author the same document online via Word. It works very well.
- e12e 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hu3 5y agoLooks like the evolution of Microsoft OneNote which I like and use daily.
- mixedmath 5y agoI was one of the (evidently very few) users of Wave. While it had many features, the one I remember now very fondly was proper message threading. It wasn't until years later that I used my first email program (mutt, of all things) with simple, correct threading. I'm still somewhat annoyed that major email providers don't support proper threading. I wonder why. Is it because email is supposed to be "easy" and threads are cognitively "hard"?
- ed 5y agoDefine proper threading?
- Jtsummers 5y agoIt wasn't flattened like in many consumer and business targeted email readers these days. Which was a sharp contrast with Google's other main communication product, Gmail, which flattened threads into conversations.
- mikewarot 5y agoYep... that's the thing that killed it... everything was constrained to a threaded chain of replies, instead of being a proper multi-user realtime editor. It was trying to be Reddit, Slashdot, HN, etc... a threaded forum post, instead of hypertext you could markup, annotate, or edit.
- kentf 5y agoSo... Notion?
- kentf 5y agoFor the record, Notion lives up to the hype.
- com2kid 5y ago> Microsoft is bringing back Google Wave, the doomed real-time messaging and collaboration platform Google launched in 2009 and prematurely shuttered in 2010. IIRC wasn't it only "doomed" because it was such a resource hog people could barely use it? From what I remember the people who could get it working loved it. > Loop components, “atomic units of productivity” OLE! But for the web! Seriously anyone else remember when OLE was a thing and you could drop a print shop pro banner in Word, click it, and print shop pro toolbars would appear? (I think it was print shop pro, if not some similar bit of software, its been 25 years so my memory isn't perfect on this exact point!) > Google Wave was clearly ahead of its time. So were the million other attempts to do this over the years, but hopefully the experience will get incrementally better with each go at it our industry tries. This is how progress happens, one step at a time. Learn from the past and make brand new mistakes that the next team gets to learn from.
- qwertox 5y agoI was into Google Wave robots development at that time and I had trouble seeing how this could scale. There was a ton of data sent to developer's App Engine instance for every edit in a conversation. It also was a privacy nightmare. IMO it was just a test from Google to see how reliably this would work, I doubt they had the intention to let it run as a product. But I really loved it.
- jsilence 5y agoYes, I do remember OLE. My colleague and I were looking forward to CORBA which was promising to do similar things in a standardized way cross platform AFAIR. Did not gain traction.
- qwertox 5y agoThe nice thing about OLE was that it was a relatively clean standard. You could use ActiveX in the browser and had multiple ways of creating them, but all those ways were focused on the programming language, rather than on frameworks. Nowadays you have Webpack and React and Node and all that stuff where you rarely get to be coding but most of the time you're spending at managing all those tools.
- paxys 5y agoWhile Google Wave obviously wasn't able to catch on from a product perspective, its tech DNA is in every real-time collaborative work/productivity app released in the last decade – Google Docs, Quip, OneNote, Slack, Figma, Notion. Loop is just next in line, and from what I can see doesn't bring anything crazy new to the table.
- agumonkey 5y agoThere will be something massive one day, because fun and productive human collaboration, so far, is a massive source of friction and waste. A lot of offices spend tons of times synchronizing, organizing shared work.. even if it's all for a one page document. One day this will be as fun as launching a Tetris game.
- adamnemecek 5y agoEtherpad predates google wave by like a year. I’m sure there were others.
- tatersolid 5y agoBack in the early 1990s we used a collaborative text editor on SparcStations running OSF/motif. I can’t remember the program name but it was pretty incredible for the time and useful for CS classes. I think it was limited to 4 concurrent editors.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rvz 5y agoSo this is same thing Microsoft did to Slack with Teams but with Loop directly towards Notion? The fact that it is completely free and open source, tells you that it is a straight 'extinguish' which was rare but now they have gone and done just that (Again). This is what 'extinguish' looks like with the new Microsoft.
- jbverschoor 5y agoI'm stunned that techcrunch doesn't mention Notion instead of wave.
- Lorin 5y agoOneNote-ish...
- askonomm 5y agoSeems like a pretty direct rip-off of Notion. It's almost as if it was deliberate.
- hiidrew 5y agoThis looks promising compared with collaborating in word
- tata71 5y agoOn what, if you don't mind the question?
- screye 5y agoIt is a HUGE improvement. I used the publicly available fluid preview for a while and it is miles better using word for any kind of collaboration. I have since gone back to using Word for collaboration and I despise it. I feel like pulling hairs off my scalp. I would say it is a competent new tool that gives you everything that notion did, while leveraging the kind of integration microsoft already goes well. The improvement is particularly noticeable not just because the product is good, but because what it replaces (word online) was so incredibly bad. Disclosure - I would put a disclosure about my employer here, but don't want to be seen publicly bad mouthing another actively maintained product by my company.
- arendtio 5y agoWasn't Wave the cloud service that promised to be a federated application, but delivered the open source server very late (like after the failure/shutdown was announced)? Comparing anything that is not federated with Wave sounds odd to me.
- vineyardmike 5y agoWave was federated? First i've heard of this. Where can i find this OSS server? Also, federated seems like the least important wave feature that people talk about.
- AlanYx 5y agoThe underlying architecture was federated; basically an XMPP extension. When Wave shut down, they handed the federated server code to the Apache Foundation, who briefly developed it under the name "Apache Wave". Apache Wave was shut down in 2018, but you can still download the code.
- arendtio 5y agohttp://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html http://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html
- arendtio 5y agoAt the time federation was not that special. E-Mail was federated and Jabber/XMPP was federated too. So it was expected, that the successor (as which Wave was marketed) of e-mail was federated too. The real time aspects, on the other hand, were pretty amazing at the time. From todays perspective the reverse might be true ;-)
- tims33 5y agoCollaboration technology startups are a ton of fun, but the problem is that eventually Microsoft always shows up to rain on your parade. Notion, Airtable, and Coda always knew they'd have to deal with this at some point.
- LenP 5y agoThis should be called OneNotion
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago…for Business!
- indiantinker 5y agoI don’t see the notion in using Notion’s UI here albeit with Miro/Figma flying cursors and pointers
- animal_spirits 5y agoMicrosoft can't make a quality clone of slack so I can't believe this will be a quality clone of Notion
- vineyardmike 5y agoHopefully it doesnt slow down as much though
- maxk42 5y agoAre you talking about Microsoft Teams? Because I hate Microsoft but Teams blows Slack out of the water by a country mile in terms of usability, reliability, and resource usage. I can't get a basic voice call working in Slack for longer than 45 seconds Teams conversely has smooth, reliable video delivery. All in all I think Discord is better than either of them but I'll take Teams over Slack any day.
- animal_spirits 5y agoI admit the voice/video chat in teams is really well done. But that's because they are using Skype's technology for that. But the actual interface, messaging, and overall experience of Teams is really bad. Just yesterday I wasn't able to do a cmd+a to select all the text in my message box. It's a clunky and annoying daily experience
- helixc 5y agoHas anyone tried to develop anything with MSFT's Fluid Framework [1], which is used to build Loop? I have not got a chance to check details. But it seems quite nice. Any general remarks are welcome. Particularly, I'm interested in understanding customizability of Fluid components, integration with React, and any concerns about Azure service lock-in. [1] "The Fluid Framework is a library for building distributed, real-time collaborative web applications using JavaScript or TypeScript." https://github.com/microsoft/FluidFramework https://github.com/microsoft/FluidFramework
- arendtio 5y agoI just took a look at the FAQ: https://fluidframework.com/docs/faq/#can-the-fluid-framework-be-used-in-a-situation-without-access-to-the-internet https://fluidframework.com/docs/faq/#can-the-fluid-framework... I think you have to consider your use case. If you want to build pure online collaboration tool it is fine. But if you want to build something that supports offline collaboration it seems not to be ready yet: > Clients do have to be connected to the Fluid service. Fluid can tolerate brief network outages and continue operating but eventually the promise of being able to merge local changes weakens. We are investigating ways to improve this using other merging techniques designed to reason over large deltas but no final solution is in place today. However, what I do like about their approach that they support multiple modern front-end frameworks from React to Vue to Web Components.
- bragh 5y agoUsually projects like this are meant to be used together with Office 365 or for extending Microsoft ecosystem. Straight from the README, but maybe there are other limitations: "This project may contain Microsoft trademarks or logos for Microsoft projects, products, or services. Use of these trademarks or logos must follow Microsoft’s Trademark & Brand Guidelines. Use of Microsoft trademarks or logos in modified versions of this project must not cause confusion or imply Microsoft sponsorship."
- vanattab 5y agoI don't get your point? Doesn't that just mean if you fork the project you can't imply that it is sponsored by Microsoft? I have seen similar clauses in most open-source projects. This seems even more generous in that they don't demand you remove all the trademarks and logos just that you can't use the logo in a way that implies endorsement.
- pgtruesdell 5y agoA new era of productivity tools by Microsoft is needed. All of their current tentpole products are just web versions of their old apps, and most of them are very annoying or slow or just weird. I'm intrigued to see where this leads as they double down on their web-first strategy. As for the Wave comparisons, it's more of a technical comparison of the Fluid framework and Wave's real-time collaboration data model/editor, right?
- hbn 5y ago> and most of them are very annoying or slow or just weird It's kinda mindblowing that in $CURRENT_YEAR we're able to do run beautiful-looking ray-traced video games on a home console that costs a few hundred dollars, but when I launch Microsoft Word on a several-thousand-dollar MacBook Pro it takes over 8 seconds from a cold start (just timed it right now). We've all just accepted that 8 seconds is an acceptable time to wait to type some words into a computer.
- mikewarot 5y agoMy crappy HP laptop running Windows 10 starts Word in less than 2 seconds... you do have an SSD, don't you?
- sylens 5y agoThis looks like a potential competitor to Notion more than Wave (as others have pointed out). It's worth pointing out that Microsoft has let its OneNote product wither on the vine in recent years, ceding use cases and market share to competitors like Evernote, Bear, Craft, and even Obsidian. People have been asking for Markdown support and the ability to insert code blocks in OneNote for years; maybe Loop will end up being the de facto replacement and contain those features.
- skinnymuch 5y agoDid they really cede market share to Evernote much? Isn’t Evernote ceding market share? I have always assumed Bear and Craft are pretty niche. Aren’t they Apple ecosystem only?
- tsimionescu 5y agoI'd be happy with Find&Replace in OneNote, but that's not on the table. They even have a handy help page [0] that needs to be seen to be believed: explaining how to copy the text you want to replace, Ctrl+F, input your search, and just repeat Ctrl+F, Ctrl+V! Someone actually took the time to write that doc page instead of implementing a basic editor feature... [0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/find-and-replace-text-in-notes-34b1f7f8-d327-40c5-8b0c-8419425ed68b https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/find-and-replace-...
- ChrisArchitect 5y agoShouts to all in here that think they were the only ones who liked Wave. I tire of the forgetful historians in here or just rehashing the old news/its place in the history of the time. Sure this is wave. Sure this is notion.(which isn't the grandiose lightbulk product fans of it seem to think it is, not to mention its significance way overblown... you think Microsoft cares what hipster-designer/dev doc collab party you're in?) The collaboration on any kind of docs/work is just natural and expected progression now. Anyone else just find this not that exciting?
- ChrisArchitect 5y agofurthermore, all these kinds of productivity tool 'advancements' and evolutions come down to people. Wave didn't fly because people didn't get it or wouldn't adapt. Sure, there were some really great parts of it and so they were extracted and moved into other apps where people could warm up to them and see some advantages. But it's people. And it's tools. And it takes time for them to adapt and grow and old habits die hard. Microsoft has taken 10 years to get to the point where its userbase may be ready for realtime collab apps that bring together multiple types of docs. We're talking about a userbase, and an age, where there is still tons of doc emailing and filename-ver-2-Copy.doc going on. Yes, lots of us have moved on from that thanks to perhaps more niche openness to new editing and sharing methods, Notion-heads, Figma jams, etc. But MS is just getting there now and who knows if customers will even end up using it since they've got other ways to collab in and out of the ecosystem on different scales. But again, meh -- not that exciting. Just tools.
- friedman23 5y agoWhere can i try this?
- aseerdbnarng 5y agoThis seems like a carbon copy of Notion which seems to have a lot of users so may be a better comparison
- ffhhj 5y ago> Loop tracks your cursor position in real time. That’s the current state of the metaverse for you right there. Nothing says I’m present and active in a meeting like moving your cursor around, after all. Great, can't wait to automate my cursor to look awake in meetings while being resting away from the computer.
- sakesun 5y agoDoes Notion host their source code on github ?
- consumer451 5y agoI realize that you comment is likely a joke but... hmm, would having Copilot v100 complete a near clone of a some competitor's software be considered as good as clean room implementation [0], legally? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
- mikewarot 5y agoGoogle Wave was amazing technology stuck with the worlds worst user interface. I recall that each person's edits were stuck in their own boxes, it wasn't a fluid multi-editor document system that it should have been.
- vxNsr 5y agoSo they announced it but didn't launch anything real yet... like there's no where to go to demo it?