Salesforce starts using its $750 million Quip deal to steal Microsoft Office users

Salesforce just rolled out new updates that tightly integrate Quip, the work collaboration app it bought for $750 million, with its core product offerings.

Quip includes a word processing and spreadsheet app, with group editing and messaging built in. Imagine Microsoft Word or Excel, but with the features of a messaging app like Slack built in.

The new updates lets Salesforce users create and edit Quip documents directly from within Salesforce products, and link Salesforce data to Quip spreadsheets.

"All this free-form, brainstorming and knowledge, could be attached to the database record in Salesforce...It really means Salesforce could be that source of truth," Quip CEO Bret Taylor said in a press briefing last week.

By having a work collaboration tool like Quip, Salesforce is not only able to offer a built-in alternative to Microsoft Word and Excel, but also lets users access and work with financial and other data that previously might have been locked in an outside file. Basically, it lets people do more of their jobs without ever leaving Salesforce.

According to financial services firm Cowen & Co., Salesforce could even launch a new standalone product called Productivity Cloud by leveraging Quip's technology, in order to dive deeper into the space.

"Productivity is a large $25 billion market (2019) with incumbent Microsoft holding majority market share, along with several newer vendors including Google, Slack, Evernote and others," Cowen analyst Derrick Wood wrote in a recent note.

"We think this acquisition will help to materially boost Salesforce's calculated total addressable market."