Yes, Virginia, there is a Microsoft version of that

It can be tough when you're stuck in Windows world, with security lockdowns on your computer and a ban on most cloud services. With the notable exceptions of UserZoom, Figma, and Overflow, I'm in MS world and that's been an adjustment after the world of Google Apps and other lightweight, web-based tools.

There's a benefit to being entirely in Microsoftland, or at least in theory there is. Kinda looks like with the advent of Loop they are trying to make good on that theory and put it into real practice.

So to say that Loop is a Notion ripoff seems partially true. But for those of us stuck here in Office 365 with no hope of using the real thing, that's totally fine. Just like Planner is not Trello and Todo isn't quite what Wunderlist was, and Power Automate is far from being as easy to work as IFTTT or Zapier — but they exist. I can imagine a lightweight database table like what Notion employs would be so much easier for many of the small tasks where I'm using SharePoint Lists. But the "components" feature of Loop seems to be where MS are really trying to take it a bit further.

The idea behind components seems to be that the pieces of functionality (like Notion blocks?) are available elsewhere in the Office ecosystem: Teams chats, Word docs, email messages. And that's the kind of interoperability that we really don't enjoy today, even though that should be a prime selling point of Microsoftland. Mail Merge isn't exactly the future. But maybe Loop will be?