Taylor says this lets you jump in and walk them through the doc using Quip’s internal messaging system. You can share any document with another user, and when they first open it you’ll get a notification. The collaboration tools might be the most exciting part. If you’re on an iPhone, an embedded photo could appear full-width, but on an iPad it would appear on the right surrounded by text. So what makes Quip different?įirst it adapts documents to whatever size or shape screen you’re working on. While no details were released, our own Ingrid Lunden sniffed out that it might be a collaborative writing app based on the pen in the app’s icon and a patent for cloud collaboration awarded to the startup. Taylor redirected his site to in December 2012, revealing the startup’s name to the world. Quip looks polished, which makes sense considering Taylor specifically left Facebook in June 2012 to start the company with Kevin Gibbs, the father of Google Apps Engine. Quip’s freemium model has a lot of runway when you think about how widespread the need for document editing is. While full featured, it’s billed as a mobile companion to Office for desktop rather than truly mobile-first, and on iOS it’s only for Office 365 subscribers. It’s only just getting a real version of mobile Office out there. That’s an opportunity Microsoft was stupid to wait so long to address. The shift to mobile is so seismic that it trumps the importance of all the legacy word processing features and “gives us an opportunity to change this software”, Taylor says. For dramatic effect, Taylor dropped a screenshot of MacWrite (shown to the right) into the Quip introduction post, and told me “It’s comical how similar that looks to what we use today.” We’re in the middle of a transition away from the desktop computer, yet word processors have stagnated. “Quip is a modern word processor optimized for the era of tablets and phones”, Taylor tells me. It automatically formats documents to the size of your screen, offers in-app collaboration and messaging, and even works offline. Quip works on desktop but is designed for mobile. That changes tonight with the launch of Quip, a freemium new word processing app from former Facebook CTO Bret Taylor’s new startup. 30 years later and our word processing software hasn’t evolved, not even to adapt to mobile.
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