Google does not own Microsoft Office, but it appears to be investing in it nonetheless: The company on Friday said that it had acquired DocVerse, a start-up founded in 2007 by two ex-Microsoft engineers.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed, though The Wall Street Journal reports that Google is paying about $25 million.
DocVerse makes plugin software that enables cloud-based collaboration in Microsoft Office applications Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. It gives Office users something similar to the collaborative functionality of Google Apps in what for many remains a more familiar, more comfortable environment.
Yet Jonathan Rochelle, group product manager on the Google Apps team, suggests all is not as it seems: Google isn’t buying into Microsoft; rather it’s buying a bridge from Microsoft Office to the world of cloud computing. There are, after all, some 600 million Office users out there, according to DocVerse, and getting them to migrate to Google Apps won’t happen overnight.
“We definitely see this as an investment in the cloud, not an investment in the desktop,” said Rochelle in a phone interview. “For us, because we’re allowing people to collaborate using formats they’re familiar with — spreadsheets and documents and presentations — we’ve definitely found a new pain point: People are saying, ‘Help us get to the cloud.’ So really for us, DocVerse is not an investment in the desktop. It’s an investment to help people who are stuck on the desktop, who are using older tools and more traditional ways to create content.”
Google has been building escape routes for a while. Last summer, for example, the company introduced Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, which allows Outlook users to connect to Google Apps for e-mail, contacts, and calendar data. It turns Outlook into what amounts to a skin, or user-interface, for Google’s cloud.
via Google Buys Maker Of Microsoft Office Plugin — InformationWeek.
