Forum Discussion
Loop development has seemingly stopped
Our team adopted Loop since many of us prefer the personal knowledge management system style of Notion or Obsidian to other classic note-taking and sharing software. However, many core features are still not present that have been Day 1 features of these other tools, and a quick check of the Loop Roadmap leads me to believe that most features will be security/governance focused. That's disappointing if true, because right now Loop is clearly inspired by those tools, but incredibly far behind in a way that makes it hard to justify their continued use. For example:
- Cannot embed documents inside Loop-- in Notion you can just drag and drop a PDF to upload, and the /embed command lets you put an interactive document inside the page
- Cannot select multiple pages to re-arrange structure
- No Copilot to perform page cleanup-- Notion lets you use AI to fix formatting, and it works very well.
- No command palette-- this is a must for operating in a knowledge management system
- No Mac app
- No mind map a la Obsidian
I could continue to produce these examples, but I am hoping to find out that once some core governance features are completed, Microsoft will be focusing some development efforts on improving this platform-- we hope it is not abandonware a few years into it's launch.
5 Replies
Now its becoming more clear how we ended up here. Apparently, since the AI floodgates have been opened and its AI first for much of the business world, the mad rush to integrate AI into everything has consequences.
LOOP, on its own, lends itself to be a convenient collaboration medium in Office365, merging SharePoint convenience with the likes of OneNote or TEAMS (as an analogy). However in order for it to support AI, there is a huge challenge to make whatever content in LOOP become augmented info for AI responses.
If you ask Microsoft's own Copilot why the LOOP authoring features are so weak, you get a response like this:
Microsoft is prioritizing semantic structure and AI-readability over traditional document fidelity. Loop is optimized for chunking and modularity, not for complex publishing yet.
Note that Microsoft is also developing something called Copilot Pages, which uses the .loop document format. This is the conduit to making LOOP content augmented for AI. So what I glean from the response is that machine learning of LOOP content is still being developed and is a higher priority than making LOOP nice to author in.
This is my take, I could be wrong, but just how I'm reading it right now.
Agreed, just plain awful from MS, getting customers to use a half baked app and then leave them in the lurch when it isn't working
Bump again! Geez.
Yet another bump. Is Loop a dead end in the MS roadmap?
Bump :)
