Microsoft's relationship with Salesforce has been under scrutiny lately. The companies have increased their various collaborations. However, Salesforce was also a bidding competitor in Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn. Now the $582 million Salesforce of acquisition of Quip puts a little more pressure between the two companies.
Salesforce announced its purchase of Quip on Monday. This is an interesting purchase as Quip is a direct competitor to Microsoft's Office suite. Of course, in Office is the leading productivity suite, but Quip aims to offer something different.
The service offers users a single space to do all of their editing, creation, and organizing. This is opposed to the Office model of offering different apps for documents, email, and other functions. Quip is also social oriented, including a Chat feature in each document and spreadsheet.
Speaking of Salesforces' buyout, Quip CEO Bret Taylor says the company is excited about the future:
“We're inspired by the possibilities ahead of us. As part of Salesforce, we will be able to expand our service more quickly and reach millions of people all over the world — which has been our mission since day one. And, we'll be able to extend the Salesforce Customer Success Platform in powerful new ways with our next-generation productivity capabilities. The possibilities of mixing data, content and communication are amazing.”
Microsoft and Salesforce
Microsoft is unlikely to be put off by Salesforces' acquisition. Salesforce recently bolstered its services tied to Microsoft Outlook. The company now adds Lightning components to Outlook, bringing full Lightning integration to Microsoft's Outlook service with a number of feature additions.
Last year Microsoft and Salesforce renewed their partnership, which has now been running for over two years. In 2016 Salesforce has released a Continuum powered Salesforce Windows 10 Mobile app, while the company adopted Outlook for the first time as its email management client of choice.
