Google acquires mobile software firm Quickoffice

Google has acquired mobile software firm Quickoffice, Inc., which enables smartphone users to view, edit and create documents compatible with the Microsoft Office suite. The Internet giant has announced the deal on its official blog but details of the transaction are not known yet.

Launched in 1997, Quickoffice provides office document software for devices running Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating systems, allowing users to view and edit Microsoft Office files with complete document data integrity. According to the company, the product has been downloaded on 300 million devices so far in 180 countries.

With this acquisition, Google seems to be taking the Microsoft rivalry up a level and it will also make the solution available on its Apps product suite.

According to Google's engineering director Alan Warren, Quickoffice is a leader in office productivity solutions.

"Today, consumers, businesses and schools use Google Apps to get stuff done from anywhere, with anyone and on any device. Quickoffice has an established track record of enabling seamless interoperability with popular file formats, and we'll be working on bringing their powerful technology to our Apps product suite," Warren said on the Google blog.

When we visited the Quickoffice site, it was not loading properly but there is an announcement by Quickoffice co-founder and CEO Alan Masarek that says: When we embarked on our mission to become the world leader in office productivity, we knew we were taking on a huge challenge. We worked very hard to build Quickoffice as a user friendly, seamless and yet powerful way to view, edit, sync and share documents anywhere, anytime. It's been a very humbling experience to see this vision embraced by our users.

Now, we are ushering in a new chapter with Google. By combining the magic of Google's intuitive solutions with Quickoffice's powerful products, our shared vision for anytime, anywhere productivity can only grow.

On Monday, Meebo, a startup that helps online publishers connect their websites with social network sites, announced on its blog that it would be bought by Google very soon. With this deal, Google might be looking to push its social networking arm Google+, which has not seen good traction recently.

In another blog post some time ago, Google announced that it would be killing some of its redundant products like mobile Web app for Google Talk, Google Sync for BlackBerry, Google Flu vaccine finder and more. On the other hand it has been seen making many acquisitions. It seems that Google is trying hard to re-invent, but we must wait and watch to find out how far its efforts are paying off.