

Box Launches Box Notes To Take On Google Docs - jchernan
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/09/16/box-launches-box-notes-to-take-on-google-docs/

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magic5227
Note to Box, please make your file formats plain html or something exportable.

I think it will take a leap of faith for a company to start creating all their
docs on Box, vs Google Docs which has been around longer. I would feel better
if I saw them stored in such a way that I wasn't afraid I was stuck with you
forever.

Maybe you can create the first modern, open docs file format for the web.
Maybe that's just html.

IE not .gdoc (.bdoc)

That is all to say, I'm not sure you can win this war on features or usability
(vs Apple and Google) but you might be able to win with security + openness.

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scrumper
If it has real, proper, version control with named checkpoints then I'll check
it out. I still struggle to believe that Google Docs doesn't have the ability
to create a named version alongside its version-for-every-change tracking.

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toomuchtodo
So lets bolt a fancy document editor on top of Github and call it a day.

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rposborne
Honestly... This could be a very useful product. We just rarely need
"branching"

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zefi
We're Kivo (YC S13) building Git for documents. www.kivo.com - would love to
chat more.

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scrumper
This is extremely interesting and directly solves a major pain point for me.
I've registered and I am going to give this a try once your Mac beta is out.

Curious why PPT first? I'd have thought a bigger issue was with Word docs. I
guess that has its own track changes thing, but it's still not got anything
approaching version control.

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gknoy
I imagine that one of their main target use cases is collaboratively editing
slide decks, or something similar. I recall when our company had some major
event last year, our exec team had over a hundred iterations of their slide
deck.

edit: Their blog [1] notes that the reason is to let them focus on executing
one well-defined thing WELL. Seems like a good idea.

    
    
      If we’re going to achieve these goals, we need to be 
      super focused. Which is why our first version is 
      specific in its scope: Kivo 1.0 is an Office plugin 
      which works with PowerPoint on Windows.
    

Kivo guys: what a great presentation, and clear explanation of what you feel
is lacking in the space.

1: [http://kivo.com/blog/](http://kivo.com/blog/)

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scrumper
I figured there was a narrow focus at this point: it makes perfect sense. I
was just wondering why that particular focus. Having thought on it some more,
it looks like a clever strategy: the Word case has a half-solution already,
with Track Changes and numbered file versions. In Powerpoint, there's simply
no such thing.

I wish the Kivo team every success.

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zefi
Thanks guys for your very kind words. Feel free to reach out to me on
zefi[at]kivo.com with any questions or comments.

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martinshen
They should just make a really good Google Spreadsheets.

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gruseom
What do you think is needed in order to make a good web-based spreadsheet?
Where do you think Google falls down at it?

(I work on spreadsheets and find this very interesting.)

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josephjrobison
They fail in their importXML limit to 50 queries They fail in their limited
feature sets that make it not a true Excel replacement They fail in their
inability to perfectly past data from Excel

I still use the Google spreadsheets all the time, but as a quick and dirty
version of excel with importXML ability

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Oculus
This has been a long time coming after Box poached one of the top guys on the
Google Docs team.

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borkabrak
Almost signed up until they required a phone number, with no explanation why.

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magic5227
Business focused service. This reduces spam + increases quality of new sign
ups.

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arsenerei
Why not Box Docs? I like the rhyme.

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malnourish
I would imagine it's too similar to Google Docs and they don't want that for a
couple reasons:

Potential (though unlikely) legal trouble and brand confusion.

