Google, on its official blog, recently announced its acquisition of privately held Quickoffice. This is, in my opinion, a really good thing. Why, you ask?
First, Google Docs on the iPad has always been a pretty terrible experience. You could easily link your apps account or Google Drive to Quickoffice on your iPad, but it was still pretty clunky and prone to errors. It made for a bad choice for document creation and management. Second, Quickoffice by itself has always been just “okay.” Some would disagree and argue that the Quickoffice program was flexible, robust and suited to mobile document creation. I think this was a common assessment only because outside of the iOffice suite of document creation, all you had was a field of crickets.
I would also venture to guess that this is a defensive move meant to counter the rumor impending release (???) of the Microsoft iOS suite of apps. I really hope we get some good products out of this. Neither Quickoffice nor Pages comes within a light-year of being powerful mobile document tools. You can bet we’ll be the first ones to beta this!
