July 31, 2013 -- Today, is the launch of Quip. Quip is a modern word processor that enables you to create beautiful documents on any device — phones, tablets and the desktop. If you haven't already, download Quip to try it out at https://quip.com/. Excerpted from https://quip.com/blog/introducing-quip.

Why Quip?

Since the iPhone was introduced in 2007, phones and tablets have transformed the way we interact with technology and each other. Smartphone sales have already overtaken PC sales, and tablet sales are predicted to pass PCs this year. Depending on where you live, this shift may have already happened — when you walk into an airport anywhere around the Bay Area, there is barely a laptop in sight amidst a sea of iPads and phones.

To call this shift disruptive is understating its impact on our industry and the world. Companies built on the PC ecosystem are desperately trying to find an identity in this new world, and many of them won't succeed. Most people in the developing world will access the Internet for the first time through a mobile, touch-screen device without ever touching a PC.

Despite the magnitude of this shift, the software that we use to get work done has not evolved over the past thirty years.

With the exception of some additional color and and a stack of toolbars at the top of the screen, it doesn't look different from the software that probably came bundled with your current laptop. We still use the same metaphors and the same workflow that we used when shoulder pads and leg warmers were cool.

The features these products have accrued over thirty years have made it difficult for most of us to switch to new products, but they have also made it almost impossible for the products to truly change. When we decided to build Quip, it was based on the premise that the shift to tablets and phones is so fundamental and so all-encompassing that it dwarfs the sum of all of these features in importance.

Quip is our perspective on how modern, mobile documents should work. We've re-thought everything — from the user interface to the underlying technology — to create the product that we want to use to get work done every day. Our entire company already runs on it. We hope you'll love it as much as we do.

What Quip does differently

We designed Quip with four core design goals:

Collaboration - When you write a document, you almost always want to share with someone else. Quip combines documents and messages into a single chat-like “thread” of updates. You can all edit the same document — no matter what device you're on — and don't have to bounce back and forth to email to talk about it.

Mobility - Quip works on the desktop, but it really shines on phones and tablets. Quip documents automatically format to the size of your screen — no more pinch zooming just to read a document! The product also works perfectly offline, syncing whenever you have an internet connection. Whether you're writing a document on an airplane or on the subway with a spotty internet connection, Quip just works.

Interactivity - You can print Quip documents, but nowadays we tend to read on touch-screens rather than printing. That's why Quip documents aren't just typeset words on a page — they're truly interactive. You can turn a bulleted list into a checklist, transforming your meeting notes into a shared task list. You can @mention other documents to link between them. You can create a table of sales data, and your entire team can type data into the table at the same time.

Simplicity - Back in the early days of GUI development, there was a popular saying: “Easy is hard.” When designing a user interface, it's much harder to remove something than to add in something new. We've worked hard to simplify the Quip interface, to leave you with a minimal, elegant design that helps you focus on writing — not ribbons.

With Quip, your phone, tablet, and desktop all work together so that communication and collaboration happens instantly in a light-weight way. You get a push notification whenever there's activity in one of your documents. That means you'll get a notification if someone adds something new to the grocery list when you're at the grocery store, and you can respond while you're shopping. Likewise, when you send your boss a proposal, you'll get a notification when she opens it for the first time, and you can jump in to interactively walk her through it.

Using Quip

Quip is available today. To create an account on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, install the app. To create an account on your desktop, visit https://quip.com/.

We also have an Android app in the works. If you already have a Quip account and are willing to tolerate a few quirks, you can download the Quip Android Preview Release today in the Google Play Store.

Quip is free for personal use and a subscription-based service for businesses. If you want to try Quip at your business, just install the app — it's free to try, and that's the best way to decide whether the product works well for your team. For more details on pricing, check out the Quip Business page.

About Quip

Quip is a modern word processor that enables you to create beautiful documents on any device — phones, tablets and the desktop. Quip is built for the way people work today — across a variety of devices and distributed around the world. Quip has a simple and elegant interface that combines documents and messages into a single chat-like “thread” of updates, making collaboration immediate and easy. You can share documents and even entire folders so multiple people can edit and discuss together in a single, shared workspace.

Quip was founded in September 2012 by Bret Taylor and Kevin Gibbs, who worked together at Google. Bret and Kevin have created or worked on some of today's most widely-used products, including Google Maps, Google App Engine and Facebook. They've hired a small team of people who are passionate about technology and about creating products for work that you actually enjoy using every day.

Our mission

When we started this company, our goal was to create products for work that you actually enjoy using every day. We think it's a shame that the apps we use at work are old, poorly designed, and bear the legacy of thirty years of feature creep and clutter. We think your time at work should be composed of the same delightful, beautiful experiences you've come to expect from modern mobile apps. We are starting with the word processor, but our mission is to eventually build the productivity suite for the mobile era.

Bret Taylor: Bret was most recently the CTO of Facebook, after it acquired FriendFeed, the company he co-founded in 2007. Prior to that, Bret was a Group Product Manager at Google, where he co-created Google Maps and the Google Maps API, and started Google's Developer product group. Bret has an MS and a BS in Computer Science from Stanford.

Kevin Gibbs: At Google, Kevin founded and was the tech lead of Google App Engine. He is also the creator of Google Suggest, which provides interactive search suggestions as you type. Prior to that, Kevin was part of the Infrastructure group at Google, working on the cluster management systems that run Google's datacenters. Kevin has an MS and a BS in Computer Science from Stanford University.