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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."
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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.
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
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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?
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.
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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.
but it's unclear what will become of the iOS ones under Google's domain
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.
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?
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
I'm not going to refute your experience with Exchange, but I will mention that where I work, we use Google Apps, and there is a calendar bug that is preventing people from accessing their calendars. This has been a problem for nearly 3 weeks now, and all I have to tell my complaining users is a 12 day old response in a forum stating that they've identified an issue and are working on it. Granted, that's less stress for me as I can't really do anything, but I don't think my users are very appreciative.
What demented moron or sadomasochist would do any serious office correspondence, typing, etc., beyond what you can do with e-mail in plain, vanilla, unadorned text using a tablet or a phone? Typing for hours and hours on such a device seems like madness to me, but maybe that's just because I know how to touch-type, and don't enjoy "typing" (if you can call it that) with my thumbs, or trying to use the hilariously pathetic rendition of touch-key keyboard they put on such devices.
Just my fiftieth of a dollar.
Outlook still occasionally loses all calendars from the favorites folder, which makes them effectively useless for anyone that doesn't know how to (or want to) browse the public folders tree for the shared resource calendars.
It does this randomly, and has since 2003.
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.
Outlook still occasionally loses all calendars from the favorites folder, which makes them effectively useless for anyone that doesn't know how to (or want to) browse the public folders tree for the shared resource calendars.
Or they could just right-click on the user/meeting room in their email (start typing what they want in the to: field and it autocompletes or open the normal address book if it is a resource never used before) and open calendar and it will automatically be added for later use. Don't dispute the bug you are talking about, but I'm working in a 10k+ user environment heavily using Exchange/Outlook and have never heard about it.
Google Apps is great, until Google decides to remove a key feature and replace it with an updated feature at some undisclosed time in the futura, ala Google Docs offline suite that used to work great with Gears. It's also been my experience that Google doesn't really seem to understand what "enterprise" support is. "oh, gmail is down in that part of the US, it will be back soon, thanks for using Google." Finally, you also need to hope Google doesn't piss off any other countries, like they did with China, forcing my company to add more VPN capability to access GMail from China. I have an email from a Google VP assuring me that Google would work hard to make sure that it's services would remain available in China without a VPN. Recent calls to Google support about connectivity issues...are basically "sorry, it's not our fault, use a VPN, we can't/won't help you. Thanks for using Google, this support incident will be closed"
How exactly is Exchange hard to maintain? I understand it doesn't scale well but it ends up in small businesses mainly.