Google's Quickoffice Purchase Takes Aim At Windows 8

alphadogg writes "Google announced Tuesday it has acquired Quickoffice, whose software could bolster Google Apps on tablets and smartphones. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. Google's second buyout in two days (yesterday it announced the acquisition of social/advertising company Meebo) gives the company more ammunition in its fight for the mobile office versus Microsoft, which is steaming ahead with Windows 8 and its Office apps. Quickoffice offers apps for Android and Apple iOS tablets and smartphones, but it's unclear what will become of the iOS ones under Google's domain."

Apple's weakness is in the office suite

[Taco Cowboy]

On the Macs, Apple relies on Microsoft to provide the office suites

On the iPad / iPhone, Apples again relies on others to provide the office suites

Which means, unless Apple purchases a 3rd party which made office suite for iOS, it may have to settle with an office suite that is owned by Google

Re:Apple's weakness is in the office suite

[Calos]

iWork seems to be pretty decent for most things. I don't have much experience myself but I know others who use it regularly, except when needing something with the power of Excel.

Re:Apple's weakness is in the office suite

[k(wi)r(kipedia)]

Not to worry. If Apple feels really threatened, it has enough money to buy any other online or offline office suite manufacturer. Corel? Zoho? And don't count out Apple's own iWork, which is probably good enough for users that find QuickOffice and Google Docs good enough.

Re:

[OS2toMAC]

Microsoft.

Re:Apple's weakness is in the office suite

[TheRaven64]

Apple provides iWork on iOS and OS X. Apple has a licensing deal with Microsoft that gives them access to the file formats for office, and can work moderately well with them. On OS X, for example, you can view PowerPoint presentations and Word documents in QuickView from the Finder.

Re:Apple's weakness is in the office suite

[SteveFoerster]

It's just a sig, you know.

Re:

[shokk]

Are you still seeing two sides in this game? The enemy of my enemy of my enemy of my enemy is very much alive here. Google will bolster iOS momentarily just enough to bring Win8 down.

Re:

[ozmanjusri]

Why would they bother when Microsoft is doing so well at that themselves?

Re:

[mystikkman]

>Which means, unless Apple purchases a 3rd party which made office suite for iOS, it may have to settle with an office suite that is owned by Google

There are strong rumors suggesting that Microsoft will be releasing Office for iOS in the fall. In fact, this story was posted only 3 hours ago.

http://www.itproportal.com/2012/06/06/office-ipad-launching-november/ [itproportal.com]

Re:

[EvilBudMan]

No worry Apple can just buy Microsoft & Facebook and then they have it all.

Re:FRIST POST!

[RubberMallet]

> make googel music better looking

Or.. accessible to places outside the US...

Re:

[OverkillTASF]

That's not Google's doing, it's the legal hoops put up by the music industry in each country. Blame them.

Re:

[Errol backfiring]

The Great Firewall of America? The USA is a lot like China these days...

Re:

[samoanbiscuit]

A lot of other companies and services that Americans take for granted are not accessible outside a small number of industrialized countries. Even Apple's media stores are very different creatures outside the US. Their much lauded " no DRM for music" stance becomes laughable when they still have DRMed music in other countries stores. The huge selection of movies and tv shows becomes significantly emptier in other countries. Amazon is another company with highly US-centric web services, outside of the US, onl

Re:

[Ayanami_R]

Well then call me stupid, but I prefer my TF300 over the iPad. Yes, I have used one, for 2 weeks after dropping my original tf101. It was an exercise in pure frustration. Editing text in text boxes alone drove me away from it. Then there is the letterboxing of widescreen content because the device, touted as one of the best ways to consume media, isn't widescreen. Getting my own music onto it was painful, playing my own video was equally painful. It refused to play nice with my DLNA setup, hell just accessi

Will Google opensource it?

[k(wi)r(kipedia)]

Since this is an app and not a backend, this seems like "logical" speculation. With a few notable exceptions, most of the downloadable Google software appears to be open source to some extent.

Re:

[Dog-Cow]

A few notable exceptions... like every single Android app?

You really didn't think this one through, did you?

Re:

[h4rr4r]

Like Google sky? Oh wait that one is open source.
Or maybe basically all the system apps, nope those are open source too.

Basically just market, goggles and maps are closed up.

Not every single Android app. I doubt they will open this up, but surely not every single Android app Google has made is closed.

Docs

[ciderbrew]

If I can get at all my content down and work off line and be able to sync up with it later then I'm really looking forward to this. My HTC doesn't really want to play along with docs right now. the page is blocked here. Does it say anything about collaborative editing?

Completing another piece of the jigsaw

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing here, but we have to consider that Office Apps are required for a platform to be seriously considered by the enterprise. Microsoft have Office, Apple have iWork, and this gives Google QuickOffice. All three also have an online viewing/editing/storage option too.

What can we expect in the future then? Google will presumably make the software free at some point, bundled with their platforms. Tablet Androids would be first, and then at some point a port to Google's ChromeOS must surely happen to make these devices more attractive. However I wonder how easy it will be to take software optimised for mobile devices with small screens and translate it to a laptop or desktop environment.

Re:Completing another piece of the jigsaw

[lpp]

What I find interesting is how Microsoft still uses the Office suite to fend off threats to the real reason it is still entrenched in many back offices... Exchange.

I've personally seen many businesses try alternative office suites only to say that while they are more or less happy with the replacements for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and the like, they didn't feel they could drop Outlook because they rely so heavily on the collaborative features of Exchange.

These companies don't want to migrate to Google's cloud based offering because they want things kept on premises. And there isn't a compelling all-in-one alternative to Exchange that is as easily tied in with their existing systems (e.g. auto-login via Windows authentication). So because they keep Exchange, they keep Outlook. Because they keep Outlook, they keep Office. And so the wheel turns.

Re:Completing another piece of the jigsaw

[JasterBobaMereel]

My experience is that both Exchange and Outlook are both terrible, badly written and hard to maintain..... but work just that bit better than the alternatives, and users are familiar with it and it does everything they need (which seems to be different for each user...)

Re:

[EvilBudMan]

How exactly is Exchange hard to maintain? I understand it doesn't scale well but it ends up in small businesses mainly.

Re:

[0x537461746943]

You must not have tried Lotus Notes. I am a heavy Linux user at work and home and generally try to use non-microsoft stuff when I can but after being forced to switch to Lotus Notes from Exchange I now realize how good we had it with Exchange.

Re:

[EvilBudMan]

--What I find interesting is how Microsoft still uses the Office suite to fend off threats to the real reason it is still entrenched in many back offices... Exchange.--

Nothing else quite like it especially for a small business. So yes, Office, is what Microsoft really has. It's been a cash cow for years, but it's kinda worth it.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[EvilBudMan]

I'm confused. I thought they were very similar.

Google branded Androids

[GeLeTo]

Quickoffice will be one of the carrots to lure manifacturers to use the Google branded version of Android instead of rolling their own ( Amazon, Baidu Yi ). This is their primary incentive, not Windows 8.

Re:

[iserlohn]

+1 Insightful (If I had mod points)

Re:

[gstoddart]

Quickoffice will be one of the carrots to lure manifacturers to use the Google branded version of Android instead of rolling their own

The manufacturers will still probably roll their own so they can have branding and the opportunity to inject some additional revenue streams and crapware. The carriers will add theirs as well.

Why sell you a device that doesn't also steer a little more revenues their way or reinforce their branding?

If the manufacturer isn't going to act like a greedy ass, the carrier will.

Re:

[shutdown -p now]

That would make sense if QuickOffice was the only Office suite for Android, or at least the best one - but that's not the case. As it is, Polaris Office is superior in most respects (and rather popular among Android OEMs - I don't think you can even buy it in the app store). And long-term, SoftMaker will soon release their office suite for Android (currently in public beta), which rips all competitors apart in terms of MS Office format fidelity.

Horrible

[imamac]

Quickoffice has some of the worst reviews for an office app on iOS. 1-2 stars. I would think Google could afford something a but better.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[witherstaff]

emacs? It's an office suite, email program, IDE, and even has a text editor.

Re:

[azcoyote]

I agree. They should have bought OfficeSuite instead. I have both on the Android, and QuickOffice is incredibly buggy, slow, very likely not to be able to open files made in other programs (including Microsoft Word), and rarely if ever updated. The only benefit of it is that it shows documents in page view, instead of just reflowed text. Sure it's got a nice interface and some good options, but it just isn't as productive a product.

Re:

[hawkeyeMI]

I prefer Documents to Go, but I have no idea if that's supported on iOS. It even integrates with Google Docs.

Re:

[azcoyote]

Docs to Go would have been better than QuickOffice, too. All three programs integrate with Google Docs though.

Re:

[Nehmo]

Quickoffice has some of the worst reviews for an office app on iOS. 1-2 stars. I would think Google could afford something a but better.

I support that - as long as it's a female "but better". :-) You probably composed that in your browser, but if you had done it in MS Word, you would have gotten a squeakily blue underline. I wouldn't know what Quickoffice would do because I don't have it. I do my word processing stuff in regular o' Office in Windows. I'm looking for reviews for Quickoffice. On their site [quickoffice.com], everything is positive. On Amazon, Quickoffice got 3.4 out of 5 stars. Which reviews are you referring to? And which version and type ar

Re:

[imamac]

The iTunes app store for iOS. And I did mean "bit".

Re:

[shutdown -p now]

Polaris Office is also pretty good, but you can't buy it separately - it either comes with your device or it does not.

Re:

[EvilBudMan]

I think mine has that and I haven't even opened it up.

Re:

[EvilBudMan]

I think the Android version might be better or at least the reviews are better on Google Play or whatever they are calling it these days.

Meebo, eh?

[MonsterTrimble]

Interesting with respect to Meebo. I used them extensively for a year or two starting in 2007 and their system was quite good - it handled AIM, MSN, Yahoo & Facebook better then almost anyone else - including Pidgin & Trillian. I stopped using it regularly when I switched jobs but I'm interested to see that they had kept building their repitoire. Now with Google in the game, that's a lot of capital to really push forward. Maybe it's time to revisit Google Plus?

This is good

[CosaNostra Pizza Inc]

The more competition there is for MS Office, the better. MS Office has become a bloated POS over the years and I hate the new Ribbon interface. LibreOffice is currently my choice for office suite.