[HN Gopher] Microsoft Loop brings back Google Wave?
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Microsoft Loop brings back Google Wave?
        
       Author : borisjabes
       Score  : 87 points
       Date   : 2021-11-02 15:29 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | hu3 wrote:
       | Looks like the evolution of Microsoft OneNote which I like and
       | use daily.
        
       | pgtruesdell wrote:
       | A 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 wrote:
         | > 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.
        
       | sergiomattei wrote:
       | That product doesn't look like Wave.
       | 
       | It's a shockingly shameless clone of Notion.
        
         | hellomyguys wrote:
         | And Notion is a better clone of Quip.
        
           | azinman2 wrote:
           | Which is a clone of Confluence, which is a clone of any wiki
           | software.
        
             | e12e wrote:
             | Isn't SharePoint a clone of lotus notes (without any of the
             | cool parts)?
        
             | skeeter2020 wrote:
             | can you really clone a broad category? Wouldn't we just
             | call that an alternative implementation?
        
               | rzzzt wrote:
               | Would parent's statement be more accurate if they said
               | MediaWiki?
        
               | nerbert wrote:
               | Wouldnt be so funny, would it?
        
           | anaisbetts wrote:
           | And both are a shameless clone of Microsoft Sharepoint - it
           | all comes full circle
        
             | tims33 wrote:
             | Which was built to combat Lotus Notes
        
         | 2pointsomone wrote:
         | Can 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 wrote:
           | I'm referring to design.
        
         | chrisfrantz wrote:
         | Relevant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29083014
        
       | ChrisArchitect wrote:
       | Shouts 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 wrote:
         | furthermore, 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.
        
       | rvz wrote:
       | So 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.
        
       | AlanYx wrote:
       | The interface looks much more similar to Notion than Google Wave;
       | I don't see the similarity to Wave.
        
         | jpalomaki wrote:
         | Microsoft is trying to bring the OLE (or whatever it was
         | called) to the web. The technology that allowed you to drop for
         | example Visio picture inside Word document and edit it there.
         | 
         | Their vision is that developers are creating these "smart
         | objects" which you can then put in various places. You can have
         | them in Teams discussion, Loop, Outlook email client etc. The
         | contents is synced between users in real-time. Instead of
         | passing links to various applications where the work is
         | performed, you bring the work to (for example) Teams.
        
           | Mountain_Skies wrote:
           | Sounds like the start of another hive of security
           | vulnerabilities.
        
         | gigel82 wrote:
         | Which 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
        
           | AlanYx wrote:
           | The 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 wrote:
             | Didn'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 wrote:
               | From 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).
        
       | jbverschoor wrote:
       | I'm stunned that techcrunch doesn't mention Notion instead of
       | wave.
        
       | arendtio wrote:
       | Wasn'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 wrote:
         | Wave 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 wrote:
           | The 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 wrote:
             | http://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html
        
           | arendtio wrote:
           | At 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 ;-)
        
       | Lorin wrote:
       | OneNote-ish...
        
       | LenP wrote:
       | This should be called OneNotion
        
         | kwertyoowiyop wrote:
         | ...for Business!
        
       | depaya wrote:
       | I 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 wrote:
         | Wave 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.
        
       | askonomm wrote:
       | Seems like a pretty direct rip-off of Notion. It's almost as if
       | it was deliberate.
        
       | indiantinker wrote:
       | I don't see the notion in using Notion's UI here albeit with
       | Miro/Figma flying cursors and pointers
        
       | sylens wrote:
       | This 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.
        
         | tsimionescu wrote:
         | I'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-...
        
       | frankfrankfrank wrote:
       | It'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.
        
         | thrashh wrote:
         | But collaborative editing predates Google Wave. The innovation
         | that Google Wave presented was using a unstructured shared
         | document for all communication. That idea is pretty dead right
         | now, and given that that is Wave's main innovation, I'd
         | consider Wave dead.
         | 
         | GSuite might have some code from Wave, but collaborative
         | editing came from existing implementations.
        
         | dafoex wrote:
         | I would agree here. Much of Wave was put into Google Docs,
         | Drive, etc., as well as various other Google office
         | collaboration products. Yes, Wave itself died, but it didn't
         | fail.
         | 
         | Google does this with a lot of their stuff, it seems, too.
         | Google Glass, for example, spread into so much of Android and
         | further: Ok Google for the Assistant came from Ok Glass; the
         | timeline made its way into Google Now and eventually into
         | Assistant again; heck, you can see the beginnings of Material
         | Design in the Glass UI. Google makes a ton of experimental
         | products only to axe them swiftly and put their remains into
         | new products.
        
         | noja wrote:
         | Google 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 wrote:
           | 10 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.
        
         | snewman wrote:
         | Do 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.)
        
           | Laremere wrote:
           | From what I've heard: Google docs had multi-user editing, but
           | it wasn't real time. Periodically the document would upload,
           | be synchronized with other copies, and then update on the
           | clients. Wave's real time cursor, synchronization, and
           | conflict resolution algorithms were integrated into docs.
        
             | QuercusMax wrote:
             | Additionally, I believe the commenting and suggestion
             | features were added to Docs after Wave was turned down; my
             | recollection is that _that_ bit is one of the main things
             | that changed about Docs after Wave.
        
             | snewman wrote:
             | You're correct regarding the original Docs implementation.
             | I had thought that the rewrite (launched around 2010 or
             | possibly 2011) was primarily based on the architecture of
             | Sheets. But it's possible there was some Wave heritage I'm
             | unaware of.
        
           | thrashh wrote:
           | Does no one remember Etherpad? It had collaborative editing
           | and Google snatched them up.
           | 
           | A year later they released Google Wave and Google Docs also
           | got collaborative editing at some point.
           | 
           | Even then, Etherpad was not the first collaborative editor.
           | It was just the first (to my knowledge) online one but I
           | believe desktop ones existed for years.
           | 
           | And of course, the principle used behind collaborative
           | editing (operational transform) is from at least 1989.
           | 
           | CRDT is the newer game in town now and it may replace OT
           | entirely.
           | 
           | As a third party observer, I take it they both Google Wave
           | and the collaborative editing in GSuite derive from Etherpad,
           | and Etherpad itself is built upon the academic papers that
           | predate it. If that is the case, while I'm sure some code may
           | have migrated over, Google Wave "died" but Etherpad lives on.
        
             | waych wrote:
             | Wave launched internally at Google to much fanfare at TGIF,
             | and the whole company was somewhat amazed at the time by
             | its realtime collaborative editing. Wave was built as a
             | secret project in Australia, so when it did launch,
             | internally there was understandably some rife / confusion
             | as to what the strategy was.
             | 
             | The tech for appjet was primarily Javascript server-side,
             | and I believe it used GWT for Java->Javascript client-side.
             | This was seen as very odd to many inside Google, as
             | javascript on the server was a new concept back then, and a
             | far cry from the "officially supported" languages for
             | development at Google.
             | 
             | While the initial launch of Wave went ~okay, the product
             | itself had massive scalability issues. The Appjet/Etherpad
             | team was then aqui-hired and quickly relocated to
             | Australia. While one would think they were acquired for the
             | similarities between Wave and Etherpad, they were instead
             | tasked with "fixing" the javascript server-side performance
             | situation. This made sense to management as appjet had been
             | pioneering the concept since before Node was a thing.
             | 
             | In the end this wasn't a great outcome for the acquired
             | team, but is typical of the aqui-hiring Google does.
             | 
             | Doc and sheets later added comments and realtime
             | collaborative editing, but it was all reimplemented and
             | never directly lifted from Wave's implementation.
        
       | mixedmath wrote:
       | I 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 wrote:
         | Define proper threading?
        
           | Jtsummers wrote:
           | It 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.
        
       | animal_spirits wrote:
       | Microsoft can't make a quality clone of slack so I can't believe
       | this will be a quality clone of Notion
        
         | vineyardmike wrote:
         | Hopefully it doesnt slow down as much though
        
       | paxys wrote:
       | While 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.
        
         | adamnemecek wrote:
         | Etherpad predates google wave by like a year. I'm sure there
         | were others.
        
         | agumonkey wrote:
         | There 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.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | helixc wrote:
       | Has 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
        
         | arendtio wrote:
         | I just took a look at the FAQ:
         | 
         | 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.
        
         | btown wrote:
         | I haven't used it, only read through documentation, but IMO
         | Fluid's problem is not so much lock-in as an embrace of old-
         | school columnar storage and handle-based object manipulation.
         | An experienced Windows developer or game dev might feel
         | entirely at home with the tradeoffs/footguns implied by
         | https://fluidframework.com/docs/build/dds/#picking-the-right...
         | ... but show that to a junior React developer and they're
         | likely to be fundamentally confused, or worse assume that the
         | only code example shown is a valid code example. (People
         | writing documentation: _please do not make one of the most
         | prominent code examples in your Getting Started an example of
         | what not to do!_ ). And on the handle front,
         | https://fluidframework.com/docs/build/data-modeling/#using-h...
         | is similarly counterintuitive, to say the least.
         | 
         | Comparatively, I'm much more excited about Automerge
         | https://github.com/automerge/automerge, which promises much
         | friendlier developer ergonomics as simple as:
         | doc1 = Automerge.change(doc1, 'Mark card as done', doc => {
         | doc.cards[0].done = true         })
         | 
         | Contributor Martin Kleppman (of Designing Data-Intensive
         | Applications fame) has great overview slides here:
         | https://martin.kleppmann.com/2021/06/04/craft-conf.html . If
         | anything, Automerge suffers from a "there's multiple ways to
         | have a server backend, including P2P and centralized, and no
         | one right way" anti-lockin problem, which is refreshing and
         | also frustrating for people who just want to try something out.
         | This is a solvable problem though!
        
         | bragh wrote:
         | Usually 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."
        
           | crandycodes wrote:
           | (Disclosure: Work at Microsoft, but I work in Azure and some
           | open source stuff, not on or directly with Fluid/Office/etc.)
           | 
           | That's just a trademark clause for Microsoft logos and
           | brands. The Fluid Framework itself is MIT licensed [0] and
           | doesn't require exposing any of those logos/brands when you
           | use it, so the framework itself is fairly open for usage.
           | 
           | I think the main thing that would slow down adoption for
           | Fluid is that the only "production" backend is an Azure
           | service, which isn't part of the open source Fluid Framework.
           | Other open source backends[1] aren't recommended for
           | productions. Until there are some open source ones, I'd
           | assume adoption will be limited to folks in the Azure
           | ecosystem.
           | 
           | [0]: https://github.com/microsoft/FluidFramework/blob/main/LI
           | CENS...
           | 
           | [1]: https://fluidframework.com/docs/deployment/service-
           | options/
        
           | vanattab wrote:
           | I 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.
        
             | bragh wrote:
             | I am not saying whether you should or should not use this
             | product. My point is that before using such products, you
             | need to read really carefully where and how you can use it
             | this product because of the included resources or intended
             | purpose for using this. It is not sufficient to only read
             | the README file and decide based on that.
             | 
             | The key part here is the second sentence "Use of these
             | trademarks or logos must follow Microsoft's Trademark &
             | Brand Guidelines.". But there can be other such limitations
             | also, just hidden somewhere else.
        
       | tims33 wrote:
       | Collaboration 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.
        
       | kentf wrote:
       | So... Notion?
        
       | kentf wrote:
       | For the record, Notion lives up to the hype.
        
       | friedman23 wrote:
       | Where can i try this?
        
       | hiidrew wrote:
       | This looks promising compared with collaborating in word
        
         | tata71 wrote:
         | On what, if you don't mind the question?
        
         | screye wrote:
         | It 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.
        
       | endisneigh wrote:
       | Serious question, has anyone ever used a collab product in the
       | way described (3 cursors and several people typing)?
        
         | judge2020 wrote:
         | Often 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 wrote:
         | We 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.
        
         | barnabee wrote:
         | We use Miro realtime with live cursors etc. in online
         | workshops. It's ok.
        
         | e12e wrote:
         | We have a brief weekly status meeting where we have a word
         | document that's used as a reference - where one person owns
         | each section. Rather than share screen, everyone just opens
         | that file, and see the live changes.
         | 
         | It works OK.
        
         | sharkjacobs wrote:
         | I did that kind of thing often enough when i was in school,
         | usually while in a room together with the other people editing
         | the document.
        
         | indiantinker wrote:
         | I think I experienced it with Google Docs once. So much context
         | switching happens until you cannot switch contexts anymore.
         | Then you are just numb.
        
         | threatofrain wrote:
         | Only for vacation planning where people are researching and
         | inputting suggestions on a spreadsheet, or where people are
         | brainstorming on a docs sheet.
        
         | topkai22 wrote:
         | No, 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.
        
         | elwell wrote:
         | NCIS has been doing this for years:
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ
        
         | binbag wrote:
         | Yes, 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.
        
       | com2kid wrote:
       | > 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.
        
         | jsilence wrote:
         | Yes, 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.
        
         | spicybright wrote:
         | It was also doomed because of Google's terrible invite system.
         | 
         | The few of my friends that got in early couldn't do anything
         | because there were so few others, and everyone else just forgot
         | about it months later after the hype died down.
         | 
         | No idea why they keep doing this.
        
           | com2kid wrote:
           | It worked for Gmail, but Gmail was so far ahead of everything
           | else at the time that people _really_ wanted in.
           | 
           | Limited invites can create buzz, Facebook did it well by
           | inviting entire universities at once, that got around the
           | problem of "no one else you know is on it."
           | 
           | Inviting purely random people to a collaborative system? Eh,
           | not such a good idea!
        
       | aseerdbnarng wrote:
       | This seems like a carbon copy of Notion which seems to have a lot
       | of users so may be a better comparison
        
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       (page generated 2021-11-02 23:02 UTC)