Google Buys DocVerse For Office Collaboration: Chrome, Android & Wave Implications?
Google has just performed its fourth acquisition in less than four weeks, this time buying a San-Francisco based company called DocVerse. Interestingly enough, DocVerse is a product used with Microsoft Office ; you know – Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the rest of them. DocVerse is both unique and valuable to Google in that it allows web-based collaboration of Office documents over the web.
Most of us are familiar with Google Docs which has a Googly alternative to all of Microsoft’s Desktop products. Surely Google will leverage DocVerse to recruit more Google Doc users… but a more interesting element to me are Chrome and Android.
The upcoming Chrome Netbooks/Tablets have been criticized a bit for being TOO cloudy. I’m guessing there are users out there who wouldn’t want to use Google Docs and want to stick with their typical Office product – my guess is now they’ll be able to. Take that a step further – since Google is bringing much of the web to our mobile devices, could they be planning an Android application that allows us to edit our Office Documents on the go and for free?
Currently DocVerse is just a plugin for Microsoft Office so you WOULD need a license to use it in that manner. Perhaps they’ll take DocVerse knowledge and incorporate Google Wave with Google Docs so they can create an unparalled collaboration tool? I’m really looking forward to seeing where Google takes this but all-in-all seems like another great move by the GOOG.
[Via Reuters]