I had the pleasure of interviewing Bret Taylor, Quip co-founder, a modern word processor that enables you to create documents on any device — phones, tablets and the desktop. Quip is diving into a crowded market of cloud-based document management and collaboration products, a market that’s impacting one of Microsoft’s cash cows, Microsoft Office.

Gartner reports that Microsoft Office currently dominates in terms of on-premises use, between 80 – 96 percent of user shares. Its single most profitable department  is the Business Division, where 80 percent of its revenue comes from Microsoft Office. (Microsoft reported a $19.9 billion in revenue last quarter.) But Microsoft is still leaving a big gap in mobile, where the cloud enables end users, and device integration differentiates.

Taylor is once again in startup mode, but he’s earned his stripes at the world’s top organizations, including Facebook where he served as CTO.  Quip’s other founder Kevin Gibbs, worked with Taylor at Google, and the two have contributed to some of today’s most widely used products, including Google Maps, Google App Engine and Facebook.

Ahead of Quip’s most recent update, which introduced integration points with top cloud services like Evernote and Dropbox, I asked Taylor about the developer challenges his team faced in building out one of Quip’s topmost differentiating features, specifically regarding device-specific and multi-cloud support.  Taylor also speaks on Quip’s enterprise pursuits, and his biggest frustration with the current collaboration market.

See the entire CEO Series with Kristen Nicole on Pinterest and Springpad!

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What developer challenges did Quip face in creating an app that interfaces across several cloud services?

The main challenge we faced was making document import work seamlessly on mobile devices. We want to enable you to import a document from an email attachment or a cloud storage service your phone so you can instantly start editing and collaborating without having to go back to your computer. These cloud services vary greatly in their mobile APIs, and we have done a lot of work to make the experience seamless on phones and tablets as well as the web.

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What security, privacy and other SLAs does a consumer-friendly, business-ready productivity tool like Quip have to consider when integrating across cloud applications?

Quip is both a personal word processor as well as an enterprise collaboration tool, and that means we build all of our services with security and reliability in mind. We encrypt all communication to Quip, and we only store the documents you have chosen to import into the Quip service.

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What are your goals and expectations regarding the enterprise space, where consumers continue to impact software design and accessibility?

The ease and accessibility of popular consumer applications — like some of the ones we’re integrating with today — has really changed people’s expectations in the enterprise for what software should let them do. We expect this trend continue to accelerate and will reward the enterprise applications like Quip that take ease of use, design, and mobile seriously.

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I find that Search is my saving grace when it comes to managing documents – how are you hoping to optimize Filters and other search tools to minimize the manual organization a user must do?

We think search and filters are both valuable tools for managing documents. With this release, we are enabling people to separate their private documents from their work documents using filters so that Quip can continue to be useful both as a personal word processing tool as well as a collaboration tool. Much like Gmail supports both labels as well as search, we hope to continue building on the filtering concept to make Quip more manageable when you have hundreds or even thousands of documents in the product.

Your biggest frustration with social collaboration?

Most “social collaboration” tools require a completely new way of doing work — a completely new workflow rather than an improvement on your existing workflow. With Quip, we’ve tried to enable collaboration in way that is natural and idiomatic on tablets and phones. Quip doesn’t require a completely new way of doing things. Companies who have adopted Quip have described it feeling like a whiteboard in the middle of their office, easily accessible and constantly changing.

We want to embrace simplicity as a core product value so people can start doing real work on tablets and phones without learning a completely new way of doing work.

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What other ways can Quip automate solutions for document management?

Our goal at Quip is to make all of your documents accessible, editable, and collaborative on every device. The main issue with mobile devices today is that most people’s phones and tablets are “read only” when it comes to doing real work like word processing, and we hope to change that for all types of documents with our future releases.

photo: Bret Taylor