


Salesforce quip software#
Salesforce provides the software and shapes the user experience for business processes people have already incorporated into their workaday habits. Here's why Salesforce might succeed where others have failed - and I include Microsoft in that group.how many of your colleagues will work on Word document shared via OneDrive using Office online? Believe me I've tried to get remote colleagues to work on a Quip document or Google Sheet and the effort invariably ends with one request: could you just email me a Word (or Excel) attachment? Prying those same workers away from such a valuable tool to work on a new collaboration system, which represents just another thing to check for updates and messages has been an impossible task. Its versatility allows many workers to turn the inbox into a work dashboard that doubles as calendar, file cabinet and to do list. The durability of email, which derives from its combined ubiquity and interoperability, will (almost likely) always be invaluable for external messages. Indeed, organizations face a looming culture clash as millennials weaned on text messages, Dropbox, Instagram and Snapchat, collide with aging baby boomers clinging to communication processes that are the electronic equivalent of memos routed in interface mail envelopes. Instead, it's human inertia that makes changing long-established styles of work nearly impossible. The problem with collaboration-centric, mobile-optimized document software like Quip or Google Apps isn't the technology. Ironically, the same survey group found email and meetings to be the most effective forms of business communication. Those numbers are inflated by data that lumps personal and business email into the total, but another survey found that workers spend 12% of their week on email, with 40% of the respondents saying email gets in the way of actual work, second only to "wasteful", unnecessary meetings. workers spend over six hours a day on email and half think it will get worse. Yet email remains the most popular office communication tool. Collaborative documents were supposed to liberate office workers from the torment of email ping pong in which multi-party email threads, bloated with attachments that get bigger every year, are the primary means of sharing information, gathering collective feedback and cooperatively creating office documents. Online document collaboration software has been around since the dawn of Wikipedia, which amounts to one gigantic corpus of interactively-developed content. If correct, Quip's $582 million purchase price will be a bargain. However, by already being core to many of its customers' business processes, Salesforce has the best shot yet at finally breaking the tyranny of the interoffice memo and bringing business communications into the era of social sharing and online collaboration. This is no easy task and many have failed to unseat Microsoft Office and Outlook as the collaboration platform of choice in most enterprises. That won't be clear for a while, but Salesforce could do for enterprise collaboration what Google and the myriad others inhabiting various collaboration software niches have so far been unable to achieve: deliver a viable alternative to document-centric communication processes that are based on a back-and-forth of attachment-laden email messages.

When news broke of Salesforce buying Quip, makers of a suite of collaborative productivity software, it was met with some perplexity given the former's seemingly cozy relationship with Microsoft and the futility of trying to upend Office's hegemony on corporate PCs.ĭiginomica's Stuart Lauchlan questioned whether this might transform the friendship into something more like co-opetition in which Salesforce opportunistically supports Office, but is ready with an alternative for customers not wedded to the Microsoft suite.
