Microsoft Launches Google Wave (techcrunch.com) 37
Microsoft is bringing back Google Wave, the doomed real-time messaging and collaboration platform Google launched in 2009 and prematurely shuttered in 2010. From a report: Maybe we should've seen this coming. Back in 2019, Microsoft announced the Fluid Framework (not to be confused with the Fluent design system). The idea here was nothing short of trying to re-invent the nature of business documents and how developers build real-time applications. Last year, the company open-sourced Fluid and started building it into a few of its own Office applications. Today, at its Ignite conference, it's launching a whole new product built on top of Fluid: Microsoft Wave Loop. Loop is a new app -- and concept -- that takes the Fluid framework, which provides developers with flexible components to mix and match in order to create real-time editing-based applications, to create a new experience for users to collaborate on documents. In many ways, that was also the promise of Google Wave -- real-time collaboration plus a developer framework and protocol to bring Wave everywhere.
I liked Google Wave (Score:2)
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Wave is open sourced and under the umbrella of the Apache organization. So it would be called Apache Wave today. I would not know what the server requirements would be and if it would run on current day hardware/software setups without (serious) code rewrites.
Can't be bothered to look it up at this hour of the day here in this part of the world, but from memory: it is Java based, so Tomcat is likely one of the requirements.
Myself I also liked the promise of Google Wave and was disappointed that Google threw
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I liked it too. This is probably exaggerated, but the way I remember it they kept Wave invite only for what felt like forever, making it really hard to get any traction. Then they launched it and announced shutting it down almost in the same breath, as if they were somehow surprised a billion people didn't instantly jump on it during the first week of general availability.
I checked the wiki and turns out it really was almost that bad. They launched in May and announced end of development in August of the sa
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It was a sort of OK idea. But they only open sourced the server implementation. Their client side made Snapchat look like a UI design dream. It was like instead of waiting for inner platform effect to settle in, they built it as one to begin with.
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We were considering rolling it out at our company at the time. Everyone testing it eventually arrived at the same conclusion, however. "This is the coolest new piece of tech that there isn't a single plausible use case for."
A lot of the co-authoring functionality it offered eventually made it into the MS Office apps, anyway. People take that experience for granted at this point.
Not sure this will work out (Score:5, Insightful)
At first my initial take was going to be, maybe Microsoft has enough savvy with developer tools to make this idea work where Google fell short.
But then I actually clicked on the first link to find more details, and the first thing I see is a graphic showing multiple cute emojis editing a document and combining to "high five" after managing to move a paragraph together.
So I'm calling this early, I don't think this idea will get any more traction than Wave.
Fundamentally why do people keep thinking that people want to collaboratively edit a document? Did they never do group projects at school?
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Fundamentally why do people keep thinking that people want to collaboratively edit a document?
This is has been my question since they started putting social and cloud features into everything. Who is it for? I don't use it. I don't see anyone around here using it. The only time I have ever seen it used is when Microsoft shows it off.
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Gen Z has been using that type of document for a few years now. First in high school and now in college.
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Yes, because collaboration in college can be helpful when working on a project or needing assistance from others in your class. In the real world, collaboration is only used, from my perspective, when feedback is needed, and then it's done one person at a time, not as a group.
I'm sure there are instances in business where multiple people collaborating on a project would need real-time interation
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Well, we use collaborative editing regularly "in the real world".
It is both used "everyone does their part and checks the other peoples parts when they have time" and "Look at this thing, should something be added or changed - quick meetings" and for actual collaborative work.
We have tens of thousands of shared google docs and sheets documents and I interact at same time with some of them at least few times every week, and in some projects several times a day.
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Many people, including me, have to collaborate on projects. But if that means everyone working on the same document at the same time, it just doesn't work that well.
YMMV
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It depends on the document. A lot of business documents have sections in the same document that can be independently worked on. Sure, you could do something to carve out into discrete pieces, but that's overhead that people don't want to fool with when they could just have multiple cursors working on different parts of the document. That said, I still don't know what this does over the current simultaneous editing capabilities of office applications.
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I find that documents usually benefit more from the kind of comment/response system most online systems have these days than full-on collaborative editing, in part because collaborators are a mixed bag. A document which is the result of 10 people editing each other's work directly is likely going to be a worse document than one individual in the group would have produced on their own with feedback.
Of course, if your document has no need for coherence, then go for it, but maybe step back and think about whe
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It was interesting watching my middle-school child do this for a year while schooling from home. I think it would drive me mad, but it seemed to work pretty well for the classes using a Google doc to write up notes.
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Fundamentally why do people keep thinking that people want to collaboratively edit a document? Did they never do group projects at school?
Here are some reasons:
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Here are some reasons:
Note that all of those uses are for extremely simple, transient documents.
I too use some shared editing, for grocery lists with my wife.
None of those needs the kinds of infrastructure that Microsoft has built up, nor that Wave provided.
Just follow that link and tell me why you would want to use that over shared Notes from Apple, or a shared Google doc for any of the scenarios you mentioned?
There are lots of reasons why people might want to do something collaboratively.
Is it really coll
Re: Not sure this will work out (Score:1)
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I most commonly get this in some customer agreement context where there's one document and people are working at the same time, but on different paragraphs.
The problem with role-based separation of what is going to be ultimately a contiguous document is that it suggests a whole lot more setup work for relatively small benefit. Attribution is easy enough to auto-add and make available, but no one's going to invest the effort to carve up designated allowed spaces in advance. Further, turn-based is too limit
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> why do people keep thinking that people want to collaboratively edit a document?
There's a difference between collaborative editing and simultaneous editing. Wikipedia is collaborative, but not simultaneous.
Good point (Score:1)
There's a difference between collaborative editing and simultaneous editing. Wikipedia is collaborative, but not simultaneous.
It's really simultaneous editing people don't care much about, whereas the ability for multiple people to edit and sync a document is useful. Still not sure I would call that "collaborative" though.
I think the element that shift a document to "collaborative" for me is some side channel for communications about the document - like Wikipedia forums, or a voice chat while editing.
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Collaboratively editing a spreadsheet is insanely useful. It gives all the useful things that a database provides for small projects. Collaborative editing is not simultaneous editing, though. It's just not having to close the file to unlock it for someone else to make changes while it's sitting open idle on your computer. Any other document being edited simultaneously would work better with one person controlling and everyone else on screen share. Constant reflowing of the content would ruin the exper
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Fundamentally why do people keep thinking that people want to collaboratively edit a document?
Because sometimes you're trying to group-source ideas on a document? Example: putting together a job description for new headcount on your team. Having everyone able to just go in and edit to add shit while in a meeting is far better than trying to get one person to do all the 'scribe' work and miss half of what is being said, and have all of their attention on taking notes rather than contributing themselves.
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Fundamentally why do people keep thinking that people want to collaboratively edit a document?
If collaborative editing is what you want, dysfunctional processes can really help you achieve that goal.
For instance, you can take a note from how we do things on my current project: tell all of the teams they're responsible for filling in their section of the status update document before they provide their update in the Zoom call, and make a point of always screen sharing the document during the client-facing call so that everyone knows their update will be seen and read by the client, but then hold off
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Fundamentally why do people keep thinking that people want to collaboratively edit a document?
Collaboratively editing is absolutely important but, and I suspect this is what you're alluding to, the question is whether real-time collaborative editing where you have multiple parties collaborating at the same time is important. I get that they want to cater for the instance where this might happen incidently but I don't really see the use case for designing workflows explicitly around multiple active real-time editors except for cases like say Minecraft.
Who is this for (Score:2)
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This is for people who are annoyed with multiple institution-wide emails bombarding their mailbox every day. There are people who use email like a chatroom/push messaging service.
Email should be reserved for formal, long-form communication.
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Those who don't want to buy into Confluence. Or Google Docs. Except they've already bought into either of those two because Wave was never given a chance.
Different from Office? (Score:2)
I didn't try Wave, and MS was slow to catch up with concurrent editing, but now using web based office, is there something fundamentally new or just an extension of what you can already do with simultaneous editors (e.g. adding mouse cursors)?
I occasionally am in a scenario where concurrent editing is useful but we get what we want out of both Google Docs and Microsoft Office applications at this point...
These systems miss the problem entirely. (Score:3)
These systems want to believe that if you make it easy for everyone to make contributions to a project, the project will just magically come together and more work will get done. Unfortunately, the core issue for why things don't get done is because nobody wants to do the work to get it done. They want to comment on whether this paragraph should be before that paragraph, or choice of words, or make sure you reference something irrelevant, but they don't want to sit down and think about things like what the document is for, and who is the audience, and how the audience will use it. Group documents are often more poorly written than any member of the group would have managed on their own.
Put another way: Meetings don't get work done, they prevent getting work done. This kind of system extends the anti-work magic of meetings into more areas of endeavor.
[Yes, yes, you need meetings to keep people on the same page, make sure the wrong work isn't being done, etc. But that upgrades them from evil to necessary evil, they still are production overhead, not production.]
We already have . . . (Score:2)
Bring back Clippy! (Score:1)
Clippy was augmented reality before its time, but its time is now. Clippy is Microsoft's best bet to rule the metaverse, I'd say.
Search results all come back the same? (Score:1)
Is there an app that stops collabor/iinterruption? (Score:2)
One that allows 8 hours of focused programming time without questions from managers, other developers, BAs, product managers, tech support and the guy who wants to talk sports? Can i buy that app? PLEASE?!