Microsoft Loop looks like an emoji hellscape

Microsoft’s biggest announcement from its last night’s Ignite event was definitely the legless-metaverse. However, there was another funky one that caught my eye: Microsoft Loop.

I know, from its name, it’s not apparent what the hell it is. I’d make a snarky joke, but TechCrunch captured it the best — it’s Google Wave. For folks who’ve accessed the internet only through smartphones, Wave was a much-hyped Google project for collaboration that died in a year.

Loop — built on the Fluid framework — is a series of content components that will be synced across its Office suite of productivity apps. These components can be notes, tables, and lists that anyone can access across apps.

You can watch Loop in action in the video below:

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The other parts of Loop are Pages (just like a document) and Workspaces (like a team project overview). When this product rolls out, they’ll be built into Microsoft Office, but they would also work on other apps such as Outlook, Teams, OneNote, and Whiteboard. Plus, you can embed these pages and components into chats and emails.

Microsoft has pressed on the fact that no matter where you’re using Loop, you’ll get the latest information as they’re updated by users you collaborate with. So you can think of it as a series of editable widgets.

I like the idea of these collaborative components and projects, but can you calm down with the emoji, Microsoft? In this enthusiastic demo GIF below, there are already too many of them used as reactions to individual ideas, and then there’s this high-five thing that nobody asked for. And I can’t handle it.

Loop will be rolling out starting this month for Microsoft 365 commercial licenses holders.  You can read more about Microsoft Loop here.