HN doesn't talk a lot about Microsoft Office, but it's by far the world's dominant software application. American adults spend 35 billion hours in Office every year, compared to 15 billion hours in Facebook, and 30 million PowerPoint presentations are created every day. Any service that handles document collaboration, such as Dropbox or Box, is dealing mostly with Microsoft Office files in the enterprise.
Shameless plug here, since we tackle the same problem: People want to collaborate in real-time, but they also want to use the standard Microsoft Office applications that they already know how to use (well, maybe not the HN crowd, but the corporate crowd). The way people use Office today is completely broken, with filenames like "Marketing_v133_Tuesday_v4_Final_ReallyFinal.pptx" being emailed back and forth in a Lynchian version control nightmare.
We're trying to go one step further with LiveLoop -- instead of bringing "save and sync" functionality to the desktop applications like SkyDrive, we bring true keystroke-by-keystroke real-time editing to Office. The first product we support is PowerPoint and we just launched two weeks ago.
I think a lot of developers ignore enterprise, and what I would call "the real world", often to their detriment. There really is a lot of room for talented developers in that area.
I think real-time collaboration within office documents would be very valuable - but it has to be really reliable.
Word and Excel are probably the key apps in my mind, rather than Powerpoint - I assume you plan these for later.
How hard to you think it will be to get this working well enough for a Big 4 to trust it?
LiveLoop, as it stands today, is really reliable in terms of data integrity -- we've been in alpha testing for months and have not lost a keystroke of data. However, because of the challenges of building this product through the COM API, we've had to make several design decisions which somewhat curtail the user experience, namely 1) some actions require explicit syncing, but the list of these actions shrinks every day, and 2) we need to momentarily steal focus at times.
PowerPoint is definitely the most important application from a collaboration perspective -- although Excel spreadsheets are important, they tend to be owned by a fewer number of people, often just an individual. PowerPoints often reflect consensus decisions, which require much more collaboration across multiple organizational layers. We'll be doing Word and Excel of course, but right now our focus is on PowerPoint.
I'm not sure what you mean by Big 4 (consulting?) but we are currently in a pilot at a Fortune 100 company.
Trust me, there is a lot of scope for collaboration on Word and Excel documents in the enterprise. Excel is used a lot for tracking progress on projects where a lot of people are involved. Most reports are in Word, and people are often stuck trying to work on the same document at the same time a day before it's due.
I don't disagree :) It's just that we had to start somewhere, and we decided to start with PowerPoint. Part of that decision was also that Word and PowerPoint have some architectural similarities so we wanted to start with one of those two.
Well, good luck to you. There's certainly a need in the area, and the technology that you build should be applicable to a number of useful applications.
Not only does it have to be really reliable, you have to convince businesses to buy it. I suspect that impacts the enterprise-ignoring significantly more than a lack of desire to make something. I.e., a lot of enterprises ignore developments in "the real world", often to their detriment.
Shameless plug here, since we tackle the same problem: People want to collaborate in real-time, but they also want to use the standard Microsoft Office applications that they already know how to use (well, maybe not the HN crowd, but the corporate crowd). The way people use Office today is completely broken, with filenames like "Marketing_v133_Tuesday_v4_Final_ReallyFinal.pptx" being emailed back and forth in a Lynchian version control nightmare.
We're trying to go one step further with LiveLoop -- instead of bringing "save and sync" functionality to the desktop applications like SkyDrive, we bring true keystroke-by-keystroke real-time editing to Office. The first product we support is PowerPoint and we just launched two weeks ago.
You can find us at http://getliveloop.com .