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.