Microsoft Loop Preview
loop.microsoft.com
loop.microsoft.com
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.
GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34773860
It's a lot cheaper. Slack contracts can easily run into the millions per year for a large org, versus... free.
I am not sure what people uses Slack for. But Teams is perfectly adequate in my opinion. Not a good idea to have lots of Knowledge and process in a chat app anyway.
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.
Notion has an official API. https://developers.notion.com/
In my opinion, Teams an order of magnitude better than Zoom and at least somewhat better than Slack.
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.
(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.
I've been a guest to both Teams and Zoom presentations, for example, and the Teams ones have gone without a hitch but the chat in the Zoom ones was a terrible, jittery mess (the video itself was fine). Teams also yields far more cleanly to wanting to join a meeting with the web app than Zoom does - we all know the company's shenanigans on that end.
For pure chat, Slack does beat Teams IME. The biggest thing is that the channels are ideally used in a more email-like fashion with dedicated topics, kind of what Doist is driving for with Twist, while Slack is just plain group chat.
But overall I've had just about nothing but good experiences with Teams - mobile-desktop handoffs or just adding the phone to not drop out while you're getting coffee is smooth, it doesn't crash, calls work well, managing team tasks in Planner, barebones as it is, is really convenient, as is having team notebooks etc. (though Loop will likely take over that).
As said, being a no account guest on meetings and webinars has been easy and worked well.
The primary issue is just that the fucker's stupidly heavy.
My biggest issue now is remembering and finding a past conversation... was it a chat? Was it in a Team channel somewhere? Was it an email?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
C'mon, Electron was literally built for atom. They took the literally framework atom was running on and built a me-too editor
You kind of say the reason in your own comment. An official linux environment in an entirely different platform based on NT is definitely a fresh concept.
In my opinion this is what I consider novel.
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.
I'm interested to see what programmatic offerings this exposes.
Some customers might want this enabled...
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/le...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/manage-loop-com...
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.
Seems rather long for a preview launch finally
I hope this does not replace or eat onenote development resources in the future.
Looks nice though!