Google Bought iPad QuickOffice

Google has acquired Quickoffice, which tends to make QuickOffice Pro HD, one of your leading iPad workplace suites. With the really least, the acquisition will give iPad end users a compelling alternative to iWork and other iOS suites.

Within a web site publish announcing the acquisition, Google Engineering Director Alan Warren stated, "Quickoffice has an established track record of enabling seamless interoperability with well-known file formats, and we'll be working on bringing their strong technologies to our Apps product or service suite."

That is intriguing mainly because, whilst Google Docs already performs with "popular file formats"- i.e. Microsoft's Word, Excel, and PowerPoint- the course of action isn't pretty: Any time you upload Workplace files to Google Docs within their native format, Google Docs converts them to its own formats before it is possible to edit them; chances are you'll lose some document formatting during the method. And in order to edit those Workplace documents on an iPad, you'll have to generate do using the mobile version of Google Documents, which can be clumsy at greatest.

QuickOffice, to the other hand, works with Office docs without the need of disruption. It preserves practically all formatting and other document characteristics within the round trip from Workplace on a Mac for the iPad and back. The suite has normally worked nicely with Google Docs also as Dropbox.

Put all that together, and Google has all of a sudden trumped all these rumors about Microsoft Workplace itself coming for the iPad. In addition, it provides Google immediate access towards the 300 million gadgets that QuickOffice says it's set up on. (The suite is available on Android, webOS and Symbian, too as iOS.) The acquisition will even put the hurt on existing iOS consumers for Google Docs which include Nikita Lutsenko's GoDocs.

Lastly, given that Google Docs is giving solution to Google Drive, it'll be exciting to see how QuickOffice's technologies will likely be incorporated into Google's on the net editing resources, as well.