Google is to acquire mobile office app-maker Quickoffice, the company has announced on its official blog. Describing its new acquisition as a "leader in mobile productivity solutions" with "an established track record of enabling seamless interoperability with popular file formats," Google said it'll work to "[bring] their powerful technology to our Apps product suite." The most obvious candidate here is the mobile app for Google Drive, the new cloud storage service which replaced Google Docs a few months ago.
Google also committed itself to supporting existing Quickoffice users following the acquisition, so even after Quickoffice's tech has made its way into Google products, the stand-alone app will remain. However, it's unclear whether the Google buy-out will affect existing deals with manufacturers and carriers that see Quickoffice pre-loaded on some handsets.
This isn't the first time a major mobile platform player has acquired an office suite developer. RIM snapped up DataViz, creator of Documents To Go, back in 2010. For its part, DataViz has continued to develop for iOS and Android even after the acquisition. We'll be watching with interest to see how things pan out with Google and Quickoffice.
Source: Google Blog
