Box Launches Box Notes To Take On Google Docs | Hacker News Reader

Box Launches Box Notes To Take On Google Docs

forbes.com

33 pointsjchernan19 comments

Note to Box, please make your file formats plain html or something exportable.

I think it will take a leap of faith for a company to start creating all their docs on Box, vs Google Docs which has been around longer. I would feel better if I saw them stored in such a way that I wasn't afraid I was stuck with you forever.

Maybe you can create the first modern, open docs file format for the web. Maybe that's just html.

IE not .gdoc (.bdoc)

That is all to say, I'm not sure you can win this war on features or usability (vs Apple and Google) but you might be able to win with security + openness.

If it has real, proper, version control with named checkpoints then I'll check it out. I still struggle to believe that Google Docs doesn't have the ability to create a named version alongside its version-for-every-change tracking.

So lets bolt a fancy document editor on top of Github and call it a day.

Someone mentioned a project like this on HN several weeks ago. Someone other than me will get good karma for linking to it. (:

More importantly, it seemed like something that the Github team is very interested in as well. In the past, such as when they introduced showing maps and other data on Github, they have expressed interest in making Github a more universally useful tool.

That'll be a fancy MS Word-compatible editor with integrated diffing. The problem with using Git(hub) is that line delta change model - perfect for code - doesn't make much sense in the context of freeform English. I care about changes to words, sentences, and paragraphs. I need to see changes in-line, most of the time.

Draft (draft.io) has the right model, but I need a native app with local storage and, again, MS Word compatibility.

Honestly... This could be a very useful product. We just rarely need "branching"

We're Kivo (YC S13) building Git for documents. www.kivo.com - would love to chat more.

This is extremely interesting and directly solves a major pain point for me. I've registered and I am going to give this a try once your Mac beta is out.

Curious why PPT first? I'd have thought a bigger issue was with Word docs. I guess that has its own track changes thing, but it's still not got anything approaching version control.

I imagine that one of their main target use cases is collaboratively editing slide decks, or something similar. I recall when our company had some major event last year, our exec team had over a hundred iterations of their slide deck.

edit: Their blog [1] notes that the reason is to let them focus on executing one well-defined thing WELL. Seems like a good idea.

  If we’re going to achieve these goals, we need to be 
  super focused. Which is why our first version is 
  specific in its scope: Kivo 1.0 is an Office plugin 
  which works with PowerPoint on Windows.

Kivo guys: what a great presentation, and clear explanation of what you feel is lacking in the space.

1: http://kivo.com/blog/

I figured there was a narrow focus at this point: it makes perfect sense. I was just wondering why that particular focus. Having thought on it some more, it looks like a clever strategy: the Word case has a half-solution already, with Track Changes and numbered file versions. In Powerpoint, there's simply no such thing.

I wish the Kivo team every success.

Thanks guys for your very kind words. Feel free to reach out to me on zefi[at]kivo.com with any questions or comments.

They should just make a really good Google Spreadsheets.

What do you think is needed in order to make a good web-based spreadsheet? Where do you think Google falls down at it?

(I work on spreadsheets and find this very interesting.)

They fail in their importXML limit to 50 queries They fail in their limited feature sets that make it not a true Excel replacement They fail in their inability to perfectly past data from Excel

I still use the Google spreadsheets all the time, but as a quick and dirty version of excel with importXML ability

This has been a long time coming after Box poached one of the top guys on the Google Docs team.

Almost signed up until they required a phone number, with no explanation why.

Business focused service. This reduces spam + increases quality of new sign ups.

Why not Box Docs? I like the rhyme.

I would imagine it's too similar to Google Docs and they don't want that for a couple reasons:

Potential (though unlikely) legal trouble and brand confusion.

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