Just shy of a month ago I put together a few thoughts on Rethinking Enterprise Collaboration including a take on companies such as Slack, Quip, and Box, among many others.
In just a few short weeks a whirlwind among these comapnies and others has ensued.
Does this phone still make calls?
Things got interesting when Talko launched on September 22nd. Founded by collaboration godfather Ray Ozzie, Talko has admirable ambitions to bring voice back to the smartphone era. I know that I personally cannot deal with voicemail but would gladly live talk more frequently when easily facilitated.
Integrations as Features
Quip hopped on the integration train September 25th, following a path popularized by Slack. They detailed the integrations with products such as Dropbox, Zendesk, JIRA and others in this blog post. A bigger Quip announcement was soon to follow.
Starting with Content Creation
Slack, on September 26th, acquired a small two person startup Spaces to create All-in-one documents for teams. This moves Slack in more direct competition with other startups like Quip and Box and industry heavyweights like Google Apps and Office365.
Battle Royale for the Office Suite
Quip upped the ante on the whole group by launching Quip Spreadsheets today on October 9th. While initially you might ask, “how different can a spreadsheet application be?” Quip has taken a holistic view for more seamless integration. Try it yourself:
- start at https://quip.com
- launch a spreadsheet and enter a few cells
- from settings choose document view
- flip back and forth to explore
This morning on Product Hunt Steven Sinofsky said,
Most interesting is how this is reflective of the very old Claris/Apple Works and is bringing back the notion that an integrated document type reimagined for a mobile/collaborative/cloud world can be very exciting.
Re-imagining content creation and publication for our mobile/collaborative/cloud world is a challenging endeavor, but one I whole heartedly support.
In a blog post announcing the acquisition of Spaces by Slack, the editors reminded us of that team’s accomplishments.
By letting go of the document’s print legacy — things like page ‘breaks’ and ‘tab stops’ — it was possible to create a new kind of document that’s much better suited to how we work today.
Steering to Content Disruption
Not to be outdone, Box today announced the acquisition of MedXT to modernize healthcare collaboration. It is the logical follow-on from the Box for Industries initiative announced at the recent BoxWorks conference. These directional moves make sense as the traditional Box world of cloud storage pricing races to zero, and Box moves from that to a world where content and worfklow matter more than raw dollars per gigabyte.
Go Forth and Collaborate
No doubt we live in a world of plentiful tools. As the race to help the world collaborate more effectively continues, expect this game to continue.
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