Google Buys Quickoffice and Meebo, Startups to Beef Up its Search and Office Businesses

PALO ALTO, Calif.
June 5, 2012 — -- In the space of 24 hours, Google has acquired two decently-sized Silicon Valley startups.

On Monday the search giant announced that it had purchased the instant messaging firm Meebo. And today there's another purchase: it has acquired Quickoffice, a company that makes mobile productivity apps for Android and Apple's iOS.

Google hasn't released the financial terms of either purchase, but in May the technology website All Things D reported that Google was considering spending $100 million on Meebo.

So what does the company plan to do with the new purchases?

"With the Meebo team's expertise in social publisher tools, we believe they will be a great fit with the Google+ team. We look forward to closing the transaction and working with the Meebo team to create more ways for users to engage online," a Google spokesperson said.

Google+ is Google's social network or service, which it sees as central to the future of its search business. Meebo offers an instant messaging service and a bar across websites for easily sharing information.

Quickoffice, on the other hand, is all about work. It will help with Google's other core offering -- its productivity offerings, including Google Docs and Google Drive.

"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," Alan Warren, Google Engineering Director, wrote on Google's blog.

Quickoffice's apps, which are available for the iPad, Android tablets, and other devices, provide word processing and spreadsheet tools.

"The Quickoffice purchase proves that Google's cloud-only productivity strategy was a failure and they needed to incorporate traditional PC productivity to be really successful in the enterprise," said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. "The fact that Google realizes they need to buy instead of build is, in a sense, a refreshing sign of business maturity."