
Google Acquires Quickoffice - jganetsk
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/google-quickoffice-get-more-done.html
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enjo
I'm incredibly excited for the guys at Quickoffice! Its really interesting, I
still feel like Quickoffice is _my_ baby (I was the lead architect from
2002-2008). It's actually kind of bittersweet to see the whole thing grown up
and headed off to Google.

My first startup experience was working in a closet (literally) on the Palm
version of Quicksheet as the second development hire.

Over the next 6 years we were bought and sold (twice) and along the way kept
growing into an amazing team. It's been really fun being on the forefront of
the mobile revolution (Palm -> Symbian -> modern phones/tablets). Quickoffice
will always be a very important period in my life.

So congratulations to Google, you've acquired a great product and an even
better team. I can't wait to see what the folks at Google have planned. I have
no doubt this is a match that will be huge for their plans in the enterprise
market going forward:)

~~~
tilarids
I am still amazed of what was done before the full specs were released. We're
still struggling with file formats from time to time.

P.S. I joined Quickoffice in 2009. Pleased to meet someone who was at the very
beginning of it

~~~
enjo
I really need to meet the new folks:) You guys did a great job!

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stewbrew
OT when did blogspot begin to suck that much? with javascript disabled, I get
an empty page. With javascript enabled, I see a stupid animation while I have
to wait for something to finish.

~~~
TillE
Pretty recently, I think. Just following in the footsteps of Twitter and
Facebook, I suppose, using fancy technology to produce a slower, more annoying
user experience.

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51Cards
Brilliant... excellent buy for Google. I have used QuickOffice across several
mobile devices and it always impresses. Tie this to Google Docs, scrap that
Android "Docs" thing Google launched last year, and we have a winner. Not to
mention a cross platform win.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
There's already QuickOffice Connect, which works great with Google Docs. I
used to use it a lot.

~~~
Johnyma22
Does it have Etherpad support?

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superxor
I once used Quickoffice on a Symbian S60 phone. I should say, it's
capabilities were pretty impressive. Especially with the meager resources
available on those old so-called smart phones.

I hope this helps Google build better native Office apps. Obviously, will also
be a big addition to their Docs back-end. But it has always puzzled me, with
the infinite resources Google has, it still has not been able to develop a
seamless import of MS Office files. Is it really that hard?

~~~
snewman
Yeah, it's pretty hard. Microsoft's spec (for the OOXML formats) is over 6,000
pages long, and extremely hard to follow by all accounts. And no, that's not a
10-page specification followed by 5,990 pages of examples. The Office apps
have incredibly complex functionality, and then factor in decades of
revisions, upgrades, overlays, and general complexity creep.

Also bear in mind that while Google does have large (not infinite!) resources,
they also have large responsibilities. Like anything, it comes down to
economics: they _could_ hire or repurpose 500 engineers to work on Office file
formats, but it's not the optimal thing for them to do.

~~~
enjo
Keep in mind, Quickoffice (I was there) did that _before_ the spec was
released:)

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zmmmmm
While this is good news, it is frustrating that Google has taken so long to
recognize how important a first class document editing experience is on
Android (particularly for tablets). When I recommend an Android tablet to
somebody it is because I tell them "it does more". However it is hard to do
that when there is barely a single word processing application available with
more functionality than say, Wordpad. Nailing a good all round office
experience with seamless integration with Googe Docs could have put Android
tablets into a entirely different position in the market than where it is now.

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mtgx
A very good buy for Google. It's probably the best mobile Office app out
there.

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rogerbinns
There is one big problem with QuickOffice which I hope Google fixes. The minor
one is that they ignore the Android AccountManager and ask for credentials
directly. Once they have an access token, it is sent to one of their servers
which accesses the document and does any necessary conversions.

Or in other words any cracker who can break into their servers can copy the
access tokens and use those to access documents, Google, Dropbox etc. I would
be astonished if QuickOffice is the first company in history to have perfectly
secured servers. Also note that if this happened you'd be extremely unlikely
to find out.

QuickOffice do not disclose this behaviour - it was only when I started a back
and forth with their customer service over AccountManager that they mentioned
it.

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leftnode
I used to work for Quickoffice and it's an incredible group of people. Very
well deserved. Congratulations to everyone there!

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filmgirlcw
This is a really, really smart move. Already QuickOffice was the best mobile
app to edit/access Google Docs and Drive files, now it's official.

Google has needed a good native offline file editor for mobile, now they have
one.

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peterkelly
It still amazes me that no-one in the mobile space is addressing the market
for editing large, structured documents of the sort you might create in LaTeX.
QuickOffice's word processor lacks support for styles, numbered headings,
cross-references, bibliographic citations, equations, automatic table/figure
numbering, and a table of contents, among other things. These features are a
necessity for scientific/technical writing, and it's basically not possible to
write something like a PhD thesis or textbook on a tablet today.

I wanted these features enough that I ended up starting my own project to
build a word processor for the iPad based on HTML/WebKit designed for
producing these kinds of documents. There's still some way to go before it's
got all the capabilities I mentioned above, and it doesn't currently support
any formats other than HTML, but I already have a lot lot of the structural
features plus support for styles working. I have a beta available and there's
some info up at <http://www.uxproductivity.com/> if anyone's interested in
giving it a try.

I'll be very interested to see what Google does with QuickOffice. Google docs
is considerably more powerful but still falls short on some of the document
structure features of LaTeX and Word. With the rumoured release of MS Office
for the iPad later this year, competition could start to heat up a lot.

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gouranga
This sounds like an admission that the web isn't up to all tasks...

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chj
This is a smart move for Google.

QuickOffice is already preinstalled on Amazon kindle fire, and in the near
future it will be the defacto office suite for Android tablets.

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singlow
I hope that this will mean an upcoming version of android will have an office
document viewer activity that all apps can include in their layouts.

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mscdex
There goes our webOS port ...

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vibrunazo
Hopefully that means we'll be _finally_ able to edit .odt files :S

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DoctorHouse
Is this the app that is built into Android that lets you open Word documents?

~~~
gdw2
It's an app available in the Android Market that lets you open word documents.

~~~
Lorin
It's also an extremely popular Symbian S60 app that many of us still use.

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Toshio
This is good news. The backend for Google Docs right now is a patchy patchwork
mess that was originally based on OpenOffice (many many years ago). Replacing
that backend with Quickoffice is going to make Google Docs a force to be
reckoned with. Can't wait.

~~~
tonfa
> The backend for Google Docs right now is a patchy patchwork mess that was
> originally based on OpenOffice (many many years ago).

Any reason to believe this is still the case?

~~~
Splines
User enjo could probably tell you.

Although I know nothing of how OpenOffice (or Google Docs) is written, I doubt
it. I _have_ been involved with the Word Viewer & Editor component in
SharePoint. The requirements of a UI-driven desktop application don't tend to
mesh well with a web-based editor.

Maybe they did make it work, but wouldn't Google need to publish those
changes?

~~~
jonknee
> The requirements of a UI-driven desktop application don't tend to mesh well
> with a web-based editor

I took it to mean the parsers for file formats (namely Office). That should be
pretty similar no matter what the UI is--you need to be able to read and write
the file formats.

~~~
Create
Rendering pixels was never the problem.

With gross oversimplification: office had binary formats (Spolsky has written
about clever-clog date handling, now forced to collide with ISO). This binary
is/was actually a memory dump of the MFC application, a serialisation on FAT
block-based file.

Newer formats are complex, because they are almost an automatic
transliteration to XML tags to keep backwards compatibility with the status
quo. All this means, that it is highly not trivial to read Office formats
without being 100% compatible with MFC. Which is not 100% possible -- even for
MS itself ...let alone others (ie. competitors). This becomes apparent, when
you try to insert a page, paragraph with copy paste into an existing document
within Word: sometimes fitting into the existing OO hierarchy will inevitably
fail. This is a long standing wont-fix bug, for good technical reasons.

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pajju
This a Big kill for other Office apps in the Store.

Google's dominance and monopoly is killing smaller start-ups and Businesses
which isn't good for our community.

They acquired Motorola Mobile, and it was a kill for other Android OEM's.

~~~
RockyMcNuts
like Samsung? They're killing it.

What smaller startups has Google killed with its monopoly? Facebook?

~~~
trentmb
> small

That word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

~~~
RockyMcNuts
Did Facebook start out big? Was Google not around when they were small? Sounds
like a successful company isn't a persuasive counterexample, would an
unsuccessful company be more convincing?

