Apparently, neither did the Quip toothbrush people.
How is Quip better than good old Google Docs?
EDIT: Just looking at it, it looks very reminiscent of Apache Wave, which I was (unfortunately) a fan of. I wonder if it was inspired by it?
EDIT 2: It seems that Quip, unlike Google Docs, is end to end encrypted, which makes it possible to use on corporate intranets that normally forbid tools like Google Docs for security reasons. Hrm.
EDIT 3: Might as well plug the newest thing _I_'ve heard of. https://discordapp.com/ is a great voice chat client, intended for gaming but surely useful for productive ends. It's Erlang-backed, as well. Seems to have great connection quality and is just a nice, fun app.
Quip has inline comments and document level comments, chat rooms, private chat, and the ability to tag people and documents anywhere. It's a really powerful collaboration mechanism especially for remote teams, and cuts down on emails.
It's extremely intuitive for digital natives, but completely turns how one views documents (as static and entirely separate from the comments on them) on it's head. It's less friendly to people who are long time MS Office users.
Google Docs has all of this (I've used all of it for the past 5-ish years). Is there something specific Quip does better?
I think Google Docs has all of the above.
Google Docs seems to cover most of this already, and is free.
The fact that a for-pay competitor to Google Docs (adding in in-context chat and everywhere-tagging) is finding success, is very interesting.
I wonder if there's a market for an end to end encrypted collab tool... all I could find was https://www.crypho.com/ which seems fairly basic.
Give me an application anyday.
Maybe it's just me getting older...
Basically, there's nothing preventing Google themselves from looking at your Docs data in cleartext. And that's bad for corps who want total privacy.
For working in teams I like how well shared document organization works.
Definitely worth a look for those who haven't heard of it before.
This is what frightens me in 2016. Apps are being developed where security is not the primary constraint. After everything we've learned about warrantless wiretapping, the NSA collecting everything, etc it's like nothing will wake some people up that they need to adjust to the new paradigm that security MUST be the primary constraint. Sigh.
There are two real competitors on the market - MS Office, and Google Docs. Office is where it is today through sheer inertia. It's a slow-moving and often terrible product. Google Docs feels like a "free product", with a lot of limitations. The market feels like someone could "Slack" it - walk in with a good enough product and just lay waste to the incumbents very quickly.
The shift to cloud-based tools is happening rapidly, pushed by the ubiquity and quality of mobile devices. Salesforce practically invented this market, and they have incredibly deep hooks into the enterprise (and lucrative enterprise licensing agreements). MS Office feels like a clunky antique hobbling users to their clunky old PCs, but Google Docs isn't going to satisfy the corporate power users who are amazingly productive with Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.
Mark Benioff is ambitious. This isn't about his RoI for some A round investment. He's already a billionaire. More money is just bouncing the rubble. What's important is he built a company, Salesforce, at the top of the second tier of the software industry. It's important enough to have shaped the industry, and make billions - but it's not Google. It's not Apple. It's not Oracle. And it's not Microsoft. If he wants to break into that tier, he needs to level the company up. Taking over the enterprise productivity app market and consigning Microsoft to the dust bin of history? That might just do it.
And finally... like all large companies, Salesforce may be facing market saturation and a tapering off of growth. It's too big to easily develop breakthrough products in house anymore. Instead, there's growth through acquisition, buying hot startups with the ample buckets of cash you have, to break into new markets.
So maybe, just maybe, this buyout is exactly what it looks like.
Think like an ambitious CEO for a moment. The dynamic nature of the situation on the ground means that Office - the most successful enterprise monopoly since IBM invented the punchcard - has never been more vulnerable. You can buy a competitor in the space who isn't carrying around a bunch of legacy, whose founder's track record of successful cloud products includes, oh, Facebook. You've already got a monopoly on an enterprise cloud product where Microsoft can't really compete. Same end user base.
Do you grab for that brass ring? Or make excuses why it's impossible?
But I know real Office power users in corporate settings. They'd point and laugh. Meanwhile, I'm beating my head against a wall trying to get Google Docs to handle nested lists and tables adequately. It's a crap product, a toy, at least by enterprise standards.
(Microsoft are doing pretty well at not leaking revenue)
Sure, everyone office in the world uses it as software of choice. I wish all software products were that terrible.
Honestly, I was thinking they will buy Evernote but I guess Evernote has crappier product and Salesforce does not need users: just something quality they can improve on it.
So the question now is: Who is going to buy Evernote?
GoogleDocs hasn't changed appreciably in the ten plus years I've been using it. I get the impression that Office 365 is eroding their solid foothold in education, and I've been seeing enterprises go to Office 365 en masse, mostly for Exchange, but the whole Office suite comes along with it.
Google Docs went publicly available in 2007 (= 9 years ago); how can you have been a user for 10+ years?
I'd assume boards are diligent when it comes to potential conflicts of interest and the $750M valuation is justifiable. But I don't know that for a fact. Does anyone have insight on how boards deal might deal with this scenario ?
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/quip/investors
edit: grammar
One challenge is we never see the instances where boards shoot down pet M&A projects, because those discussions happen behind closed doors without a merger announcement.
[0] http://www.wsj.com/articles/lendingclub-ceo-resigns-over-sal...
[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-and-solarcity-agree-to-2-6...
Person A & B also own Company Y.
Company X buys out Company Y for 5m which later leads to bankruptcy of Company X with creditors left holding the can.
How is conflict of interest treated here? What if Person C also has equal shares in Company Y. Is Company X debarred from buying Company Y. Can creditors sue Company X directors ?
On the Quip side he will recuse himself from the final decision, but of course he had insider info, and can offer a lot of reasons board, management might not want to look for a higher.
Seems like a nice exit, but seems foolish to pretend conflicts don't exist. In fact, like someone said "no conflict, no interest."
What makes you say this?
1. Talent: As others say, an all star team. I've interacted with some of them as a vendor (Quip is our customer) and know a couple of them as friends of friends, and they have a rockstar team.
2. Integration: This is going to add collaborative document sharing to Salesforce's product line. Much like the Chatter acquisition to beef up their "collaborative, connected customers" story.
3. DATA: Essentially, Quip's metadata is the intra-organization graph of who collaborates with who. While Salesforce needs to be careful how they are going to use it (and definitely need to create the technical infrastructure to take advantage of this data), this is a deep well of customer knowledge that they can parlay into selling other Salesforce products.
I think the other 2 are nice, but I'm not sure I buy them. I've used the product and for a rockstar team it was kind of crap. They're trying to build slack-dropbox-googledocs all in one, and it's substantially less capable at each of those tasks than the individual products. Maybe now they'll have the resources to build it out and make it actually good, but I have no idea how such a product in its current state is worth 750M.
What I'm more curious about is whether they integrate with Salesforce? Where do they make sense under the salesforce umbrella?
The price tag of $750M is a little too much for me but I'm anyway not verse in these kind of deals (and I was under impression that Quip is in trouble since I haven't see a lot of people using it).
Maybe Quip doesn't, but Salesforce certainly does.
Note I don't fully understand the valuation either but it seems like there are definitely synergies here.
If I was a betting man this is salesforce's (necessary) response to the news from Microsoft that they are integrating the dynamics stack with office 365.
Not that there's anything wrong with it; Salesforce is a great place to work in many ways, but like many big companies they have trouble retaining key employees after acquisitions.
Bret is one of the most outrageously talented and productive people I've ever worked with. In a high-leverage position, such a person can be extremely valuable.
CEOs are often paid hundreds of millions of dollars, and some VP-level executives at big companies are also worth that kind of money.
> Taylor said Quip has millions of individual users and 30,000 business customers, though not all of those are paying.
So to do some back of a napkin math if they had 15,000 paying customers (50% of their noted business userbase) how much would they make in revenue? I've distributed the numbers across different levels of SaaS monthly bills because most customers will pay for the cheaper packages.
75% (11250 customers) * 5x users = $30/m = $337,500/month
15% (2250 customers) * 7x users = $50/m = $112,500/month
10% (1500 customers) * 10x users = $70/m = $105,000/month
5% (750 customers) * 25x users = $230/m = $172,500/month
Estimated Revenue: $727,500/month
or $8,730,000/year
[1] http://www.recode.net/2015/10/15/11619612/bret-taylors-quip-...
I would suggest that, perhaps, "HN household names" and "things lots of people actually use" are not particularly strongly correlated.
10% of 30,000 = $1,746,000/year
100% of 30,000 = $17,460,000/year
What makes this word processor worth $750M?
[1]: https://www.census.gov/hhes/computer/files/1984/p23-155.pdf
It is difficult to see the role of libre office (or any native only app) in the enterprise for much longer.
I'd say they are becoming lower by the day. Microsoft have announced Dynamics365 and I suspect they will double down on competing with Salesforce now.
Particularly now that Salesforce are competing against office365 with quip.
Salesforce only have a CRM, and even though it is popular they don't offer ERP, financials or any productivity tools.
I think they got greedy when they rejected Microsoft. With oracle buying netsuite (super charging their product dev funds) I think Salesforce will be in a bit of a pickle in a few years time, as they simply won't be able to offer an integrated package to the same level of depth their competitors do.
My experience with customizing Dynamics is extremely poor, I'm a C# developer but the thought of touching that gives me horrors equating to Sharepoint.
I don't have any experience with NetSuite, so I won't say anything about it. Regardless, as long as Salesforce keeps being a great platform for quickly hammering out LOB apps I don't see it going anywhere, our parent company is heavily invested in it and we have doubled our licenses over the past year and are looking at upgrading most of them from the "App Cloud" licenses to full "Service Cloud" licenses to take advantage of the case-management functionality so our teams can have everything under one roof instead of having to go back and forth between email, zendesk, and Salesforce.
[0] https://medium.com/@btaylor/react-with-c-building-the-quip-m... [1] https://twitter.com/bithavoc/status/750419283797237761 [2] https://twitter.com/bithavoc/status/760231521211080704
I mean Bret Taylor is a pretty big name, and we've all known that he was working on Quip for a while. There are a bunch of Bay Area companies that use Quip and the Quip team made a big deal about the future of mobile word processing when they first came out.
I'd be less surprised if the general public was unaware, but interesting to see the surprise come from the HN crowd.
"An interesting side-note, though: While this deal means Microsoft will use Office 365 for e-mail and calendaring, they probably won't get much use out of Microsoft Word — Facebook uses Quip, a mobile word processor developed by former CTO and current Twitter board member Bret Taylor, for word processing."
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/top-facebook-exec-microsoft-go...
See also embedded tweet.
It's more like the combination of Google Docs and Slack: realtime documents and chat seamlessly linked.
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