Google buys Quickoffice, more improvements to mobile productivity apps on the way

Quickoffice is a name that should be familiar to most of you – their mobile productivity suites are popular on both iOS and Android, and they have cut many deals to preload their software on handsets, so chances are if you own a high end Android handset you have Quickoffice installed even if it isn’t your main productivity suite of choice. Today Google announced that they have acquired Quickoffice, indicating they will incorporate its technology into future Google productivity offerings.

Google indicated that they "look forward to continuing to serve" current Quickoffice customers, so in the short term there is no need to panic if you are really attached to your Quickoffice apps. In the medium term we imagine that much of their technology will be used to improve Google Drive and Docs – both mobile and web-based. In particular we’d like to see Quickoffice’s excellent compatibility with Microsoft Office documents get integrated – Google Docs doesn’t always do the best job of importing PowerPoint presentations in our experience.

In the long term it’s not hard to imagine Quickoffice users eventually being migrated to a Google-branded version; all it takes is a name change to the app, and then subsequent updates could work towards feature parity with Drive/Docs. Quickoffice has a decent sized install base of mobile enterprise users that Google is probably interested in, and a carefully managed long term transition could probably bring them into the fold without alienating businesses.
Google complete statement is:

source: Google via TechCrunch