Google gets serious about mobile enterprise with Quickoffice buy

Google has agreed to purchase mobile productivity startup Quickoffice, the company announced in a blog post.

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“Today, consumers, businesses, and schools use Google Apps to get stuff done from anywhere, with anyone and on any device,” Google Engineering Director Alan Warren wrote on the company blog. “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.”

Quickoffice offers users a suite of applications for Android and iOS that allow you to view, edit, and sync all kinds of documents. It claims that its apps are installed on more than 300 million devices in over 180 countries. The company could help with attracting mobile enterprise users to Android over iOS if it can make Android a more attractive platform for business.

On its company blog, Quickoffice CEO Alan Masarek wrote that he is happy to be joining the Google family:

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.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. No word if Quickoffice will ditch its iOS applications and only offer Android apps, but it wouldn’t be too far-fetched. It could also simply just let its iOS development languish and put all its effort into making Google’s Android OS document apps better.

This is the second Google acquisition in two days, with the first being Meebo. The Quickoffice buy will almost certainly give Android a slight enterprise bump while Meebo will likely boost Google’s social and advertising products.

Photo credit: Quickoffice/YouTube