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.
Right, so instead of competing on quality, the established player can put out a vastly inferior product that ticks enough checkboxes and rely on the cost savings and easy of bundling to gain market share, pushing the superior competitor who actually delivers a quality product out.
From a game theory perspective, I get why companies do this. The level of management signing these POs don't rely on Notion or Slack the way the people who work for them do.
But this unquestionably makes everything worse. It eliminates real competition on merits and quality, replacing it with market leverage. It's anti-competitive. And Microsoft knows all about being anticompetitive.
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.
Not really. There's an export option that dumps everything into a zip file for you. Multiple other apps have import from Notion ability, and it's also easy to read the exported files directly.
There's even a semiofficial API that works pretty well - you can read Notion notes in VSCode, for example.
Have you never sent a message with images just to later find out that the message wasn't sent and it wouldn't even show up on the chat so you could retry?
(and even more recently, messages without images suffer from this, albeit at a much less frequency)
Have you never tried to join a meeting where teams made you just sit there for a minute trying to connect until you decide to restart it?
Have you ever called someone at the same time as they call you, ending you with teams saying that they are calling you at the same time as you are calling them and no one can accept the call ?
Have you ever tried to click on an old message from a search result, just to end up nowhere near the message?
Have you never joined late to a meeting because teams didn't notify you that the meeting had started?
If you have an external calendar account linked to outlook, have you never noticed that the linked calendar events don't show up in teams calendar?
Have you ever clicked on a message notification, scrolled a bit up or down to a different message and have teams snap you back to the notification message for no good reason?
Have you never noticed your teams status showing that you are in a meeting when you are not, even without any scheduled meeting in the calendar?
Have you never had your teams randomly hanging and your fans spinning to the max for a few seconds, with teams either getting back to normal or crashing afterwords ?
In a meeting, have you never had to ask the person that is sharing the screen to re-share it, because you are not seeing their screen?
Also in a meeting, have you never had the issue where people's cameras and screen shares are not showing up, forcing you to rejoin the meeting to get a 50% chance of everything working properly?
I haven't used teams in a few years, but the old version written in AngularJS was hands down, the worst piece of software I have ever used in my life. It was slow, bloated, clunky, every aspect of it was terrible.
You might be hearing opinions from people like me who remember the old Teams experience and have since moved off of it a long time 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?)
It's really cool that you got to work on this from the early inception. I've had my eye on this since it was hinted at many Ingnites ago.
I've never seen an app that can do live collaboration on a document as seamlessly as Loop. Between my phone, laptop and computer, the changes are seemingly instantaneous and that has to be a major accomplishment.
Asides from the web app being a Notion clone, the actual loop components are the most interesting user-facing tool I've seen Microsoft release in a very long time. I've been piloting Loop by myself for over a year and have been introducing it to my team over the past few months.
It'll be interesting to see how this develops over the next few years. I'm really interested in how 3rd party developers can leverage it.
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?
All state including the app logic, UI, and app state of the component was shared/stored/synced via Fluid (I believe now Azure Fluid Relay.)
This simplified integration because each app only need to include a simple boot loader that could connect to the appropriate endpoint and then load every part of the component.
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.
"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
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).
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.
That allows them to enter new markets.
And push new tools under the Office subscription.
If there was a more dominant player in the Office Tools space, then they might be stuck playing catch up.
Similarly Google Pushed it's office tools under the Gmail for Domains ( Suite, Workspace etc ) Subscription.
They used that domination to enter new markets.
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.
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.
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) AFAICT, while leaving actual chats / meets to teams as you said
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.
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.
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.
WSL original? Are you kidding? The 'L' stands for Linux: it just tries to copy Linux on Windows, providing a Linux environment on an OS that's entirely different. If anything, it's a reverse-copy of WINE.
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!
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
From a game theory perspective, I get why companies do this. The level of management signing these POs don't rely on Notion or Slack the way the people who work for them do.
But this unquestionably makes everything worse. It eliminates real competition on merits and quality, replacing it with market leverage. It's anti-competitive. And Microsoft knows all about being anticompetitive.
There's even a semiofficial API that works pretty well - you can read Notion notes in VSCode, for example.
In my opinion, Teams an order of magnitude better than Zoom and at least somewhat better than Slack.
(and even more recently, messages without images suffer from this, albeit at a much less frequency)
Have you never tried to join a meeting where teams made you just sit there for a minute trying to connect until you decide to restart it?
Have you ever called someone at the same time as they call you, ending you with teams saying that they are calling you at the same time as you are calling them and no one can accept the call ?
Have you ever tried to click on an old message from a search result, just to end up nowhere near the message?
Have you never joined late to a meeting because teams didn't notify you that the meeting had started?
If you have an external calendar account linked to outlook, have you never noticed that the linked calendar events don't show up in teams calendar?
Have you ever clicked on a message notification, scrolled a bit up or down to a different message and have teams snap you back to the notification message for no good reason?
Have you never noticed your teams status showing that you are in a meeting when you are not, even without any scheduled meeting in the calendar?
Have you never had your teams randomly hanging and your fans spinning to the max for a few seconds, with teams either getting back to normal or crashing afterwords ?
In a meeting, have you never had to ask the person that is sharing the screen to re-share it, because you are not seeing their screen?
Also in a meeting, have you never had the issue where people's cameras and screen shares are not showing up, forcing you to rejoin the meeting to get a 50% chance of everything working properly?
If not... Well... Lucky you, I guess.
You might be hearing opinions from people like me who remember the old Teams experience and have since moved off of it a long time ago.
Teams... does not.
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
[2] https://twitter.com/geoffreylitt/status/1637592619269214209
I've never seen an app that can do live collaboration on a document as seamlessly as Loop. Between my phone, laptop and computer, the changes are seemingly instantaneous and that has to be a major accomplishment.
Asides from the web app being a Notion clone, the actual loop components are the most interesting user-facing tool I've seen Microsoft release in a very long time. I've been piloting Loop by myself for over a year and have been introducing it to my team over the past few months.
It'll be interesting to see how this develops over the next few years. I'm really interested in how 3rd party developers can leverage it.
This simplified integration because each app only need to include a simple boot loader that could connect to the appropriate endpoint and then load every part of the component.
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.
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.
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.
That allows them to enter new markets. And push new tools under the Office subscription.
If there was a more dominant player in the Office Tools space, then they might be stuck playing catch up.
Similarly Google Pushed it's office tools under the Gmail for Domains ( Suite, Workspace etc ) Subscription. They used that domination to enter new markets.
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.
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!
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) AFAICT, while leaving actual chats / meets to teams as you said
A lot of things have changed at Microsoft under Satya Nadella. One thing that hasn't changed is their inability to create anything original.
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.
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.
Is every FPS a Doom clone?
Every wiki a wikimedia copy?
Every browser a copy of Mosiac?
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!
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.