> Microsoft is bringing back Google Wave, the doomed real-time messaging and collaboration platform Google launched in 2009 and prematurely shuttered in 2010.<p>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.<p>> Loop components, “atomic units of productivity”<p>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!)<p>> Google Wave was clearly ahead of its time.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.
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.<p>Particularly, I'm interested in understanding customizability of Fluid components, integration with React, and any concerns about Azure service lock-in.<p>[1] "The Fluid Framework is a library for building distributed, real-time collaborative web applications using JavaScript or TypeScript." <a href="https://github.com/microsoft/FluidFramework" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/microsoft/FluidFramework</a>
Collaboration technology startups are a ton of fun, but the problem is that eventually Microsoft always shows up to rain on your parade.<p>Notion, Airtable, and Coda always knew they'd have to deal with this at some point.
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.
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.<p>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?)<p>The collaboration on any kind of docs/work is just natural and expected progression now. Anyone else just find this not that exciting?
This looks like a potential competitor to Notion more than Wave (as others have pointed out).<p>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.
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.<p>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"?
So this is same thing Microsoft did to Slack with Teams but with Loop directly towards Notion?<p>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).<p>This is what 'extinguish' looks like with the new Microsoft.
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)?<p>Comparing anything that is not federated with Wave sounds odd to me.
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.<p>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?
> 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.<p>Great, can't wait to automate my cursor to look awake in meetings while being resting away from the computer.
Google 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.