Let the Mobile Office Wars Begin: Google Buys Quickoffice

Grazed from Technorati. Author: Steve Woods.

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.

One thing I’ve learned is that being first on the scene with a product often makes one first in people’s minds in the long run, even when competitors appear. Although there are a number of pricey iPad apps like Documents to Go Premium that allow users to create and manipulate Office documents in cloud environments, Google already has a toehold with millions of Docs users. Many of them will consider the $10 purchase of QuickOffice a non-issue, and if Google transitions the paid-for product to a free version, even better.

Let’s not forget the overlap of 300 million Quickoffice users likely soon being encouraged to create a Google account through the app – another win for Google, and a possible setback to Microsoft as it seeks a toehold in placing its name somewhere, anywhere, in the exploding market of mobile devices.

I’ve been long awaiting Office for iOS, but am also a Google fan. Today’s Quickoffice acquisition sure sounds like a complete solution, but I’m still waiting for Microsoft’s response. I say let the mobile office wars begin…