Let the Mobile Office Wars Begin: Google Buys Quickoffice
This morning cloud computing giant Google announced, quietly, on its company blog that it had made yet another new acquisition. The roar of this latest purchase, however, will be heard for a long time to come, especially in Microsoft's Redmond, Washington headquarters.
"We're happy to announce that we have acquired Quickoffice, a leader in office productivity solutions," begins the post by Google's Engineering Director, Alan Warren. If you're an Android or iOS tablet user, you may've heard of Quickoffice's suite of cloud-supported office productivity tools, designed to allow users to remotely create, edit, store and share PowerPoint, Excel and Word documents. According to Quickoffice, their product is on 300 million mobile devices worldwide.
With Docs and Drive, Google has an incredibly powerful set of office tools online already - so why the need to sidle up to the bar next to a company like Quickoffice? Why, mobile user experience, of course. Despite the intuitive interface for larger-screened desktop computers, Google's mobile environment still leaves much to be desired. Quickoffice is a proven leader in providing a simple experience in making and manipulating the most important forms of information sharing in offices, schools and in government - getting their hands on such a powerful user interface is a major coup for Google.
With the Quickoffice buy, Google has just stomped in Microsoft's front yard a mobile office footprint that cannot be ignored. It has been heavily rumored that Microsoft is to release its own Office for iPad this year - perhaps as early as September. Over the next few months, expect Google to integrate its Docs-based formatted tools alongside Quickoffice's native Microsoft formats.
"Quickoffice has an established track record of enabling seamless interoperability with popular file formats, and we’ll be working on bringing their powerful technology to our Apps product suite", added Warren in the company post. Google will soon not only tout its highly successful Docs format to mobile users everywhere, but also encourage Office lovers to create their favorite document formats using the newly integrated tool.
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