Tired of waiting for Office to be optimised for their mobile gadgets, a growing contingent of younger companies is turning to cheaper, simpler and touch-friendly apps that can perform word processing and other tasks in the “cloud” – on internet-based systems.
Take Artivest Holdings, a New York-based financial services startup that sells alternative investment products. The New York-based company uses an app called Quip, which combines word processing and messaging, to handle all but the most sensitive legal and financial files.
“There are no more Microsoft Word documents being circulated. If someone emails me a Word document, I’ll tell them to put it in Quip,” said Artivest’s chief investment officer David Levine.
I think this is dead on. My kids don’t use Office and they don’t own a watch (they use their phone or computer if they want the time). The world is definitely changing.
This article smells a bit like PR for Quip. I agree that Office is losing steam, but in the real world (i.e. organizations not focused on tech), Office files remain pretty ubiquitous. I also find the quote from the guy at Artivest a little suspect. This is a company that claims to serve high-worth individual investors. Is he really saying that if a customer sends him an Office file his response is to scold him? It would have been nice if the reporter had followed up on that.
Until North America in particular is more willing to accept open standards (e.g. http://opendocumentformat.org) MS Office will continue to rule. Using tools such as Quip instead, is no better, as it is similarly proprietary.
(Jim / Dave: I could not read — or post — comments when I read this article using Chrome my iPhone. You may want to look into this. I’m posting via a Mac now.)
I hope when Tim Cook reads this post on The Loop, he wonders why this company prefers to use Quip, over the combination of iWork and iCloud.
I am not sure how important Word still is, but I will say this: In nature, if you don’t adapt to changing environment you become extinct.
One hipster startup anecdote does not make a trend.
Go to any school or business and see what they are using for word processing (and more importantly spreadsheets). It is all Office. And 25 years of format lock in does not get swept away so easily.
After all, didn’t they say the same thing about Google Docs when that came out? Yet that hasn’t destroyed Office either.