“We’re happy to announce that we have acquired Quickoffice, 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.” Excellent acquisition – Quickoffice has always been a fine product, and this gives Google instant access to a wide array of native mobile office applications. Crazy nobody else ever picked these guys and girls up. Also, if Google makes Quickoffice available for free, we can enjoy yet another “Google is competing unfairly by not charging customers money for products”-whine-a-thon. That alone is worth it.
I had QuickOffice on my Palm Vx and Palm T|X. Never actually used it, but then again I don’t like typing with a stylus. But who does?
Who likes typing on any phone, for that matter? Whether it’s a pickboard with a stylus, or the current crop of smartphone keyboards – it’s all just one big pile of suck.
Well, it depends. Small messages are no problem and then I prefer fingers over a stylus. On an iPad longer texts are more doable, although I wouldn’t write a novel on one.
QuickOffice is a little bit okay for viewing documents, if they are text files, spreadsheets are less fun, but I wouldn’t create or edit them.
For some strange reason despite QuickOffice (and others) being hyper compatible with MS Office files it doesn’t take much to edit a document which then suddenly looks very odd in real MS Office.
And now I’m going to try and find my Palm Pro.
Keep in mind that Quickoffice can run on Android tablets too, so that *might* make productivity using Quickoffice more attractive in the future (not trying to read ‘tea leaves’ but I’m sure Google had a point to buying them besides ‘strong base of users’)
It’s not all that bad, some physical keyboards are very nice for what they are. The Motorola Cliq was a turd of a phone, but it had the best keyboard I’ve ever used on a mobile device. I could type faster on it than anything but a real computer keyboard, and could do so for half an hour without getting fatigued or frustrated.
Some people swear by BlackBerry keyboards too. My hands are a bit big to be really comfortable on them, but compared to portrait QWERTY phones from other manufacturers they are very good.
And Thom, I believe I’ve seen you praise the WP7 on-screen keyboard more than once.
The keyboards on the Danger hiptops still win for me as far as portables go.
Who likes typing? Keyboards are completely unergonomic, even with better layouts.
I have to agree with others, there are some good keyboards out there, but they are attached to otherwise sucky phones.
I like typing on my iPhone keyboard just fine. It’s not as good as a real keyboard, but it gets the job done, and I’ll compose rather long missives on it. Then again, I didn’t mind using graffiti on the Palm for long documents either. I don’t much care for Blackberry-style physical mini-keyboards, though.
you are the exception, then.
I love the keyboard on my phone (Xperia Pro), especially when in an SSH session. There’s no way I’d ever “upgrade” to a phone without a hardware keyboard.
I’m currently looking at the Motorola Droid 4 as a possible upgrade, as it has the most “normal” keyboard layout (including a number row and proper symbols above the numbers).
I see something good in this acquisition. Unless Google put that people to work on Google Docs, not sure about that, but I see that they are finally noticing that with pure web applications you will not go very far. I love the web but you can not wait years for it to be 100% competitive with applications that run locally
That group over there crying in the corner is Documents To Go.
Well it seems (checking who they are in the most straightforward place http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documents_To_Go ) that Documents To Go is owned by RIM – so they’re probably sobbing constantly for some time now, anyway.
Edited 2012-06-08 23:11 UTC
Haha, yeah, that is totally sweet how the largest operating system vendor in that market segment is buying a piece of software to integrate in their OS and give away for free to cut off a competitor, take that Netscape. Wait, what, Quickoffice you say?
OK, not that comparable, but price-dumping is a rather touchy issue when a big platform owner is doing it. Microsoft will survive either way, but it is rather unfunny for anyone else trying to compete.
Edited 2012-06-05 21:06 UTC
To me this means a couple of things:
1) They finally admin Google Docs sucks monkey balls.
2) Windows 8 is coming for ARM and tables, so they need something to compete with MS Office.
It is a well thought move.
Edited 2012-06-05 21:38 UTC
Or just like Android and ChromeOS, Firefox and Chrome, Picasa and webpicasa etc. Google plays both fields native and web.
I like more my theory.
I hope they’ll improve google docs. It seems the only good reason for this.
It’s not a full fledged office suite, but it’s not exactly terrible. Who uses all the esoteric features of MS Office any way?
In the place I work they exploit office at its maximum, it is a valuable tool for business, they can’t live w/o excel, it is simple a must have, pivot tables, it is even connected to SAP Business One to get their reports there so they can manipulate it at their pleasure, word is another tool the use daily and it is another must have, so, believe it or not there are people who use it extensive.
The Human Resources department use Power Point a lot also.
Yes? And Google Docs never claimed to be a full fledge suite. No one claims you can support entire enterprise workloads on Google Docs. It only claims to be good for collaborative work, which it is.
You asked:
Who uses all the esoteric features of MS Office any way?
And I simple answered, way to twist it.
/me ignore you.
Edited 2012-06-06 03:13 UTC
If google budles QuickOffice with android and makes it natively integrated along with the drive how does it differ from MS bundling IE with Windows?
A more correct comparison would be if MS bundled Office with Windows Phone.. Oh wait, they already do that.
When WP reaches 50% penetration you’ll be right.
True, however while WP is still small, MS Office is widespread with way over 50% penetration, and it’s currently only available on Windows, Mac OS X and Windows Phone, thus creating a lock-in.
My original point however, was that since MS already bundles Office with WP, whining about Google in the future bundling QuickOffice with Android is not justified. Hell, most Android devices come with Polaris Office bundled anyways, so what’s the problem?
Mine came with thinkfree office, good enough for me not to switch since. I guess most people would probably feel the same with any other (e.g. quickoffice) as well.
Edited 2012-06-06 13:50 UTC
They already bundle it with Android. It came on my NexusOne, but not fully functional. That is – they used it as a library for something, so I can’t uninstall it; yet I can’t open it without paying $5USD either. So it sits and takes up 5MB of disk space that I’d rather use for something else.
If I had a tablet, I’d consider trying it out as I’m quite interested in using a tablet to produce documents (when combined with a BlueTooth keyboard or similar means of typing).
I just want a Free Software mobile office suite with proper ODF support.
LibreOffice is coming (this year?) to Android.
From what I hears, Nokia did some effort to adopt KOffice to smartphones. Meego doc viewer is based on that.
Is it going to be a cloud app or a local Android app? In usual Google fashion, the most important question is left unanswered till the product is unveiled
Edited 2012-06-06 11:36 UTC
That might not happen. I’d guess all these mobile Office suites are only available for purchase (barring limited trial or viewer-only free versions), because they have to pay licensing fees to use Microsoft Office’s document formats. While Google and cough up the money to pay Microsoft’s licensing, I’m not counting on them actually doing so.
Just like I don’t expect RIM to offer a full version of Documents To Go for free either.
If so, how do OpenOffice and LibreOffice manage to provide office document import and export for free.
For more information visit here http://designersx.com/blog/news-for-gdrive-%E2%80%93-go…