GOOGLE ACQUIRES QUICKOFFICE MOBILE APP

Recently, Google acquired Meebo. Today, Google has just
made a very important acquisition. Google has acquired
Quickoffice, which is known as one of the very best, if not
the best mobile office applications on any mobile platform.
It makes QuickOffice Pro HD, one of the leading iPad office
suites. Along with the technology, Google also acquired the
team behind it, a very experienced group of people that
have been working on QuickOffice probably for more than
a decade.
In a blog post announcing the acquisition, Google
Engineering Director Alan Warren said, “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.”
That’s interesting because, while Google Docs already
works with “popular file formats”—i.e. Microsoft’s Word,
Excel, and PowerPoint—the process isn’t pretty: When you
upload Office files to Google Docs in their native format,
Google Docs converts them to its own formats before you
can edit them; you may lose some document formatting in
the process. And if you want to edit those Office documents
on an iPad, you’ll have to make do with the mobile version
of Google Documents, which is clumsy at best.
QuickOffice, on the other hand, works with Office docs
without disruption. It preserves almost all formatting and
other document characteristics in the round trip from Office
on a Mac to the iPad and back. The suite has always
worked nicely with Google Docs as well as Dropbox.
Buying QuickOffice will also help with pushing Android into
the enterprise market. Google can now offer a more fully
featured office app on Android phones and tablets, which
will most likely appeal to the more sophisticated customers.
Finally, given that Google Docs is giving way to Google
Drive, it’ll be interesting to see how QuickOffice’s
technology will be incorporated into Google’s online
editing tools, as well.
How important is mobile going to be in the next chapter of
the office suite wars? Does this move give Google a leg up
on Microsoft?