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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."
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.
> make googel music better looking
Or.. accessible to places outside the US...
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.
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'
That's not Google's doing, it's the legal hoops put up by the music industry in each country. Blame them.
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, only Kindle books are reliably purchasable, their movies and music much less so. While a great deal of effort and attention is payed by these companies to the US market (and rightly so, I don't dispute that it's one of the largest consumer markets and certainly the wealthiest), Android's success outside the US seems more to do with how Samsung, HTC and other asian players have people and products on the ground in other markets that those other companies (Google, Apple, etc) don't have.
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.
The Great Firewall of America? The USA is a lot like China these days...
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
How exactly is Exchange hard to maintain? I understand it doesn't scale well but it ends up in small businesses mainly.
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 accessing network shares took some effort. The youtube app is HORRIBLE and for a device that supposedly has no bloatware I could not remove newsstand, imessage, or a few other things I knew I wasn't going to use. Then there's itunes... I couldn't fully "sync" with more than 1 computer at a time. REALLY!? I threw some documents to take to work on it and then couldn't transfer them to my desktop. I missed widgets the most, having to open 8 apps instead of just a few swipes though my homescreens was painful.
"Science is the power of man"