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So Microsoft office can finally do what Google docs did more than 10 years ago?
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Hats off to Microsoft. About time we had a serious competitor against Google Docs.
It's generally wise to be skeptical of this sort of demonstration. It's been my experience that the cool stuff that Microsoft shows off at these events might actually land in six months to a year, sometimes farther out, if it actually comes about at all. I've been beating my head against the wall with Teams for a couple years now, as features drip out like molasses - there are things I saw demoed almost a year ago that won't land before Christmas this year.
Also when people start the hand-waving about plugging in arbitrary bits of AI to help out with tasks, my engineer brain explodes a little bit, because that is hard to do right, beyond cute little proof-of-concept demos. It's great to demonstrate and put in the marketing material, but the real-world usage and effectiveness often leaves a lot to desire.
Odd... I remember editing Word documents in Microsofts cloud offering as far back as 2012 ~ 2013. Maybe even sooner? Point being this is just a marketing piece. In Microsofts case you likely will still be able to work offline. I was editing files on both desktop and web at my former job. Its nothing new to Microsoft. Personally I prefer Office to Google Docs.
Now even Microsoft is releasing the next generation of document creation tools as cloud only. Does anyone still think that we will do the thin clients to powerful personal computers transition for mobile too? I really wanted it to happen but I'm losing faith.
Instead of personal computers you will have personalized clouds with an AI that know too much and yet be more useless than a real AI we envision and mostly used to serve you ads cause its all "free" but at a cost.
Kind of what OLE was supposed to be back in the day? Just web based this time? It seemed like Microsoft's pushing of the document component object model never really stuck back then as people gravitated back to monolithic text documents and spreadsheets for the most part. I wonder if it will work this time.
How it never stuck?
I get nested Office documents all the time, sometimes taken to extremes that even Microsoft might not even had thought about, inception style.
OLE became COM and ActiveX - but the terms are too broad to mean anything. Disregarding the low-level COM infrastructure (the ABI, component-oriented libraries, IUnknown and IDispatch, etc), a reboot of OLE’s concept of human-editable “objects” contained in other applications’ documents simply won’t work for various reasons mostly related to the currently very sad state of GUI programming on Windows: it’s a mess.
OLE worked fine back in the 1990s because there was only really one way to make a GUI: Using a Win32 User32/GDI Device Context to render something while it received window messages representing mouse and keyboard input.
Now in Windows 10, User32/GDI is deprecated and obsolete for high-performance applications (and it’s really slow too after they axed GDI hardware acceleration in Vista), but there isn’t a single replacement, instead there’s like 5 of 6 - all incompatible with each other. While it’s true that it shouldn’t matter because OLE objects were rendered to their own separate hWnd, consider that the new UWP system doesn’t use hWnds, and frameworks like WPF have “air gap” issues with rendering their content overlaying another hWnd and often resort to hacks using window content blitting which drastically hurts performance (as you need to blit to/from RAM, instead of keeping it all in VRAM).
So if this approach is not allowing components to render themselves to a surface then it must be using an some other representation like HTML+CSS or something like WPF’s XAML such as Silverlight - and that has its own set of problems (e.g. any HTML+CSS will be outdated in 5 years, and we all saw what happened to Silverlight.
If this is web-only, then that means this is the beginning of the end for the rich desktop experience for Office - but it’s also irrelevant because we’ve had <iframe> for over 20 years - and the new Web Component system is gaining popularity.
AFAIK, GDI acceleration came back in Windows 7 (with WDDM 1.1 and later GPU drivers).
Only for a small subset of operations, like Blitting - everything else (like 2D accelerated line and shape drawing) was made slower.
I understand the business and technical reasons for doing this - but Microsoft never replaced GDI with an _approachable_ replacement. Direct2D is nice, but it's very difficult to use from the .NET world, whereas GDI is a first-class library feature in `System.Drawing`.
From the (thin) copy here, it appears this is very much what Google Wave wanted to be, including an API for stateful robots that collaborate alongside you. Hopefully the API layer will allow for custom presentational components, allowing developers to go beyond simple "office-like" use cases, into multimedia creative applications.
Maybe the world is now more ready for a Google wave style of service.
Reminds me a lot of Notion.so (https://www.notion.so) which got me to move away from OneNote for the first time for about a year, but the lack of pen support forced me to switch back.
Having all the data in the "document" stored in a database of sorts and then being able to pivot the display and reference and pull in across different surfaces was a very useful in practice. From the copy and mockups also might be fair to view this as a mashup of AirTable + Access + OneNote.