<story><title>Salesforce buys word processing app Quip for $750M</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/01/salesforce-buys-word-processing-app-quip-for-750m/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>beat</author><text>Thinking about this just in terms of product...&lt;p&gt;There are two real competitors on the market - MS Office, and Google Docs. Office is where it is today through sheer inertia. It&amp;#x27;s a slow-moving and often terrible product. Google Docs feels like a &amp;quot;free product&amp;quot;, with a lot of limitations. The market feels like someone could &amp;quot;Slack&amp;quot; it - walk in with a good enough product and just lay waste to the incumbents very quickly.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;t going to satisfy the corporate power users who are amazingly productive with Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.&lt;p&gt;Mark Benioff is ambitious. This isn&amp;#x27;t about his RoI for some A round investment. He&amp;#x27;s already a billionaire. More money is just bouncing the rubble. What&amp;#x27;s important is he built a company, Salesforce, at the top of the &lt;i&gt;second tier&lt;/i&gt; of the software industry. It&amp;#x27;s important enough to have shaped the industry, and make billions - but it&amp;#x27;s not Google. It&amp;#x27;s not Apple. It&amp;#x27;s not Oracle. And it&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;And finally... like all large companies, Salesforce may be facing market saturation and a tapering off of growth. It&amp;#x27;s too big to easily develop breakthrough products in house anymore. Instead, there&amp;#x27;s growth through acquisition, buying hot startups with the ample buckets of cash you have, to break into new markets.&lt;p&gt;So maybe, just maybe, this buyout is exactly what it looks like.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>curiousDog</author><text>You seem to be unaware of the fact that Office isn&amp;#x27;t desktop only any longer. Office 365 is growing like crazy and there&amp;#x27;s no way Salesforce is going to catch up before the cloud wave blows over. Infact, modernizing and getting office on ever device has been the shtick of Satya since he took over.</text></comment>
<story><title>Salesforce buys word processing app Quip for $750M</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/01/salesforce-buys-word-processing-app-quip-for-750m/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>beat</author><text>Thinking about this just in terms of product...&lt;p&gt;There are two real competitors on the market - MS Office, and Google Docs. Office is where it is today through sheer inertia. It&amp;#x27;s a slow-moving and often terrible product. Google Docs feels like a &amp;quot;free product&amp;quot;, with a lot of limitations. The market feels like someone could &amp;quot;Slack&amp;quot; it - walk in with a good enough product and just lay waste to the incumbents very quickly.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;t going to satisfy the corporate power users who are amazingly productive with Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.&lt;p&gt;Mark Benioff is ambitious. This isn&amp;#x27;t about his RoI for some A round investment. He&amp;#x27;s already a billionaire. More money is just bouncing the rubble. What&amp;#x27;s important is he built a company, Salesforce, at the top of the &lt;i&gt;second tier&lt;/i&gt; of the software industry. It&amp;#x27;s important enough to have shaped the industry, and make billions - but it&amp;#x27;s not Google. It&amp;#x27;s not Apple. It&amp;#x27;s not Oracle. And it&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;And finally... like all large companies, Salesforce may be facing market saturation and a tapering off of growth. It&amp;#x27;s too big to easily develop breakthrough products in house anymore. Instead, there&amp;#x27;s growth through acquisition, buying hot startups with the ample buckets of cash you have, to break into new markets.&lt;p&gt;So maybe, just maybe, this buyout is exactly what it looks like.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bla2</author><text>You probably haven&amp;#x27;t used Google Docs in a while. It&amp;#x27;s much more capable than four years ago in my experience, and does everything I want it to do these days.</text></comment>