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Quip Chat Rooms — Real-time chat with your team
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@btaylor every few months you and the team launch a big new addition to Quip. Was real-time chat on your roadmap in the beginning (~2 years ago) or has this seemingly renewed interest in the space (largely driven by Slack) influenced this direction?
@rrhoover This has always been on our roadmap, thought the shape of the product has changed a bit over time, obviously.
When we launched, we combined messaging and documents so people could collaborate on a document without reverting to emailing attachments. Since then, messaging has been a huge part of the product experience, and we've constantly expanded the functionality.
This is a bigger expansion than before, but chat, docs, and spreadsheets have always been the pillars of our product experience.
I'm very curious to see how all of the competition in docs / chat plays out. A quick, non-exhaustive roundup...
Quip: (Mobile Docs) + Doc Chat + General Chat
Dropbox: (Files) + In-doc chat + Composer
Slack: (Chat) + Posts + Snippets
Evernote: (Notes) + Work Chat + Context
Google Docs: (Docs) + Chat + Comments + Email Notifications w/ replies
Microsoft Word + Office 365: (Docs) + Chat + more
Any thoughts on Quip's secret sauce @btaylor?
@btaylor @jasonyogeshshah Not only is there more to this list (Trello, Asana, Basecamp, etc etc...) but I think it misses the point. In this marketplace there doesn't have to be a secret sauce. People work differently and like different interfaces. Dropbox itself is a result of the cross-collaboration of multiple types of computers.
What we need is a standard non-proprietary format to be the root of all of these. Maybe JSON is as close as we'll get.. or maybe we'll just have Yet Another Standard.
@btaylor @toobulkeh Hm. Yeah I def. think different strokes for different folks makes sense, and there are often several players in a given space, so no argument there really. I guess I'm more intrigued by the RECENT collision of historically distinct collaboration solutions - Quip had mobile docs, Evernote has personal notes, Yammer/Chatter/Hipchat/Slack had chat, Dropbox had files, Asana had tasks, Basecamp had tasks/projects too, Trello same...but now they're all (inevitably) doing what the others were doing before, with Evernote doing chat, Dropbox doing notes, and so on. That probably has happened before in history (enterprise software has always seen land-and-expand product strategies and user bases)...but the past 12-18 months has seen exceptional heat in this area.
Congrats to the team, been loving Quip for collaboration. The ability to collab over docs on mobile is unparalleled.
I noticed the ability to @ mention a file in the promo video.
This stood out to me as more unique functionality than everything else. I think it will take something powerful and unique to displace existing solutions. I don't know if this would be the thing but it's interesting. (In the context of Slack, which handles files poorly IMO, this theoretically could be a competitive advantage).
@ mentioning objects (and not just people) is a compelling concept intellectually but then I wonder about the utility in a cloud-collaboration world (URLs vs. files). What happens - I mentioned the doc, so now you can see meta data about it without checking + click to open it directly vs. finding it on your own? The metadata I'm not sure would be more valuable than what I can type into chat myself. As for faster than finding the doc myself and quick access to docs, I suppose that's true if all my docs are in Quip and I don't want to have to attach a file or copy a URL from somewhere else...hm, I guess it's valuable for power Quip users, but I'd like to see something that makes a non Quip user want to do docs in Quip vs. elsewhere if I were the PM on this. Maybe that's coming. I think Dropbox has the same challenge with Dropbox Composer - why use that vs. a different document editor? If they could leverage their stronghold in files that would make it better to use them for doc editing, that'd be compelling, but I haven't seen that from them yet either.
Anyway, congrats (from downstairs!) on the launch @btaylor and team - excited to see how you all help evolve the collaboration space.
@btaylor @jasonyogeshshah Fwiw, I believe this to be the "single thing" that has 1. mass resonance 2. huge pain that every person in the professional world has experienced... I'm always trying to think about the one thing that you tell your friend which is big enough pain so that everyone gets it + can spread. "Never share another file. Just mention it." - My lawyer is the only person that still sends me documents and it is terrible.
"Work with people, not files." just doesn't make it clear on what that means. Be provocative.
Well, I'll start by saying that Quip is my favorite product. I use it every single day and it's my command center. That said, I'm not sure if I'm in the minority, but for me quip is definitely and intentionally an asynchronous environment and use case. Creating documents requires uninterrupted thought and attention...it is an exercise of minutes or even hours, not seconds...and i think the collaboration model prior to today honored that element of the use case. to me chat is a synchronous use case that doesn't really fit into my use case and mindset when using quip. @btaylor how does chat, as opposed to the prior messaging/collab features, supposed to fit into the document creation workflow?
@jordancooper That is a very insightful question - it's something we talked a lot about in building this product.
In our experience, teams use a combination of asynchronous, thoughtful, permanent forms of communication (wikis, documents, etc) and synchronous, ephemeral forms of communication (chat).
With Chat Rooms, we tuned the way notifications work to recognize the differences between the two modes of communication. You can have tens or hundreds of Chat Rooms without being overwhelmed. But the power comes in the integration. You can have an ad hoc chat discussion about a new design and, with the click of a button, start a design doc with everyone in the chat. We think the experience is greater than the sum of its parts because both forms of communication are important, and we think they should work seamlessly together.
Did anyone migrated from Slack? Any real case advice would be useful!
I would love to use this because having documents and chat in same app looks awesome. However I am having a hard time convincing my team to move off of slack.
For me the main issues are:
1. Not video calls.. (not a deal breaker)
2. The chat rooms does not appear in the chat tab of the mobile app. This is very bad in comparison of slack that have very very easy access to channels. I also cannot be able to make appear a channel in the sidebar for everyone.
3. This not look very maintained. The hubot project in the github does not work right now, it does not connect, and it does not have documentation. The node API does not appear in NPM. This is very bad comparing to the slack strategy to be a great platform for devs.
You are going to have a really tough time convincing me to move off of slack. All the more power to you though and I hope you light a fire under slack so both products get better.
@btaylor: What would you say is your major differentiation from Slack? The messaging video doesn't make it obvious why my team should pick Quip over Slack.
Hey everyone, I am the founder and CEO of Quip and happy to answer any questions you have.
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