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.
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.
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.