My thoughts…
Microsoft 365 has come a long way and with Microsoft Loop there’s no doubt it plans to take Microsoft 365 to the next level of collaboration and productivity.
In 2020, Microsoft had open sourced it’s Fluid framework ( which is a Library for building distributed, real-time collaborative web applications). Fluid was designed to deliver collaborative experiences with blazing performance by keeping the server logic simple and lightweight. This helped almost instant syncing across clients with very low server costs.
So, Microsoft Loop is basically a rebranding of some of its Fluid Framework artifacts. And also a new standalone Loop app for project management and collaboration in 2022.
With the success of Microsoft Teams during the pandemic which tied together data from Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Microsoft Outlook to be as helpful as possible this is definitely the next step to enhance that collaboration aided by cloud-powered AI across web, desktop, and mobile.
Microsoft Loop consists of three elements: Loop components, Loop pages, and Loop workspace.
Loop components are the renamed and updated Fluid components like tables, notes, tasks etc; the platform is extensible and beyond these components third-party application developers will also be able to build Loop components. We should hear more about those in the next Microsoft developer conference ( Microsoft Build).
This is from Microsoft’s blog.
“Loop components: An evolution of Fluid components—are atomic units of productivity that help you collaborate and get your work done in the flow of your work—in a chat, email, meeting, document, or Loop page. Loop components can be as simple as lists, tables, notes, tasks, or as sophisticated as a customer sales opportunity from Microsoft Dynamics 365, and because components stay in sync, no matter how many places they live in, you and your team always work with the latest information.“
Loop is supported as a standalone app/canvas and can also be embedded inside other apps. So these components will be part of Microsoft apps like Outlook, Teams, OneNote, and/or Whiteboard.
I believe the app is rolling out to commercial customers of Microsoft 365 and I don’t think there’s any information available about the licensing and pricing at this moment.
Now coming to Monday, I personally “DON’T THINK” that Microsoft Loop will be a Monday killer.
Monday already has couple of good integrations with Microsoft Teams.
* Microsoft Team App
“The Microsoft Teams App allows you to add any monday.com boards directly into your Microsoft teams channels. With this App, you will also be able to customize which notifications from your monday boards you’d like to receive. These notifications will be sent only to you through the monday chatbot.”
* Microsoft Teams integration
"The Microsoft Teams Integration allows you to trigger specific actions when a condition is met. Unlike the Microsoft Teams App, with the Microsoft Integration any notification from a trigger will be sent to the whole channel. "
So, with the productivity and performance benefits that Microsoft Loop brings, I’m quite sure that Monday will leverage and use that to further enhance their platform by building extensions and the integration with Microsoft.
The most important advantage that Monday has is that it’s vendor agnostic. For example Monday not only integrates with Microsoft Teams, Outlook but integrates seamlessly with a host of other vendors like Salesforce, Slack, Dropbox, Zoom, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Gmail, LinkedIn, Zapier, Adobe Creative Cloud and the list goes on. On the other-hand, for Microsoft it could be a catch-22 situation to try and integrate with some of those.
And with the industry heading towards Increasing Automation and Decreasing Repetitive tasks, Monday provides a solution that is addressing both of those trends. Consumers are best served when they don’t have to worry about where their workloads are running; they could be runing on any cloud or on-premise. The best of the breed companies that are solving that use case are poised to have hypergrowth for the foreseeable future. They are playing a very crucial role in this digital revolution. Some names that come to mind are Datadog, ZScaler, Snowflake, Crowdstrike, Cloudflare and also Monday.
Note that Salesforce Ventures and Zoom made early investments in Monday and a Keybanc study found that 67% of CIOs say collaboration is their #1 budget priority. And some 95% percent of IT and engineering leaders say their organizations are prioritizing workflow automation
I don’t see any reason to get worried about Monday and hold a 6% position.
Just my 2 cents!
Cheers!
ronjonb ( @ronjonbsaas on twitter)