[sambroner]

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?)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMzXmkrlFNg

[2] https://twitter.com/geoffreylitt/status/1637592619269214209

[atrain101]

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.

[elcritch]

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?

[sambroner]

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.