Google Acquires Quickoffice | Hacker News Reader

Google Acquires Quickoffice

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183 pointsjganetsk51 comments

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:)

QuickOffice was definitely one of Symbian's very few truly great third party software - so congrats for having been a big part part of this!

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

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

Would you care to elaborate on the "working in a closet" part? :)

It was actually the server room. We had a couple of desktops serving the website and the development staff (two of us) crowded in there to work as well:)

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.

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.

It's not blogger itself, but blogs with certain new formatting templates. (Which don't seem to do much obvious for the reader, other than display those silly spinning gears if the browser isn't up to snuff or has some kind of NoScript plugin enabled.)

I caught it at least as far back as October. It's a fundamental disconnect with providing content. Strangely enough, I ran into it from a HN link. I wrote about it at the time, for what it's worth.

http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/10/01/blogger/

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.

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

Does it have Etherpad support?

The Android Docs app has already been renamed Google Drive.

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?

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.

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

Sun did it back to improve StarOffice, though with only a few.

Does Microsoft have seamless import to 365? I honestly think it's not just hard, it's impossible. There are always going to be formatting glitches that creep through.

Having worked at Quickoffice years ago on the spreadsheet team, I can tell you that yes, it is really, really hard to do well.

People expect when they open their spreadsheet that the formulas they wrote on the desktop will provide the results they see on the desktop. Ok, well it's just math right? Yes, and no. Excel actually has a lot of bugs with the execution of their formulas, so to be accurate you have to emulate all the mistakes they make. You also have to discover these bugs yourself, as they are not conveniently documented somewhere.

I ended up writing a unit test framework using generated Excel spreadsheets containing permutations of formulas with every possible input, just so I could identify where these bugs might be happening. Then you have to reverse engineer WHY they happen in the first place, and also find out if this was something the Excel team fixed in later releases, or left in because they themselves could not break backwards compatibility.

And this was what I would consider a small problem for us back then. The biggest problem was always round-tripping of unsupported data. The Office file format is large, complex, and full of crap you wouldn't imagine supporting in a mobile product. However, your users expect that if they open a spreadsheet to change a number on their phone, when they save it and re-open it on the desktop all the fancy formatting and pivot tables still work and haven't been lost.

Anyways, this is a great purchase for Google and I congratulate all the guys who have put in the hard work to make Quickoffice the amazing product it is today.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

There goes our webOS port ...

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

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

It's not built into Android, but I think some Manufacturers (HTC?) ship with QuickOffice (or QuickOffice Viewer) pre-installed.

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

Also Excel and Powerpoint... plus editing:)

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

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.

> 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?

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

like Samsung? They're killing it.

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

> small

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

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?

Google doesn't have any monopolies. They dominate search, but their showing in office/productivity applications has been abysmal. No domination there.

Google bought Motorola Mobility, who have been intensely underperforming for the last couple of years. Other manufacturers have been excelling; look at the success Samsung has had, for example. If you really fear Google and their dominance, office productivity apps shouldn't be the center of your fear.

What do you have to say for the other numerous Office apps in the Android market and AppStore?

There are competitors to many of the built-in functions already. How many other browsers does Android have? How many other email clients? Heck, even a competitive app store from Amazon. Just because Google does it doesn't mean there's no more room for competition.

Thanks, good convincing point. :)

Not sure about that - I've been using SoftMaker's beta Office apps and I find them much, much better than QuickOffice for maintaining document fidelity.

I suspect that the first company to reach the uncanny valley in terms of document fidelity and round-tripping is going to win out - Google support or not.

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

Says who?

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