RSSDocverse acquisition paves way for Google Docs in the enterprise
Google acquired document collaboration company Docverse last week, a move designed to shore up the capabilities of Google Apps to interoperate with desktop-created Microsoft Office documents. Such capability has long been desired by business users, who are heavily reliant on the Office platform to date and faced with few good options for moving documents and operations to cloud-based solutions even when those solutions represent significant economic advantages.
The Docverse acquisition represents expertise as much as IP, which is an important step toward bringing Apps a higher level of interoperability with Office. Google is not low on talent, by any means, but it has not, to date, shown much capacity or interest for delving into the intricacies of Microsoft products. That sort of talent is going to be necessary to bring better and smoother interoperability with those products, and that interoperability represents the wedge the company will need to use if it hopes to supplant the status quo with its own products.
I have questioned, and probably will continue to question, Google commitment to enterprise penetration with various services it has posed for such services. The company's bread just isn't buttered on that side right now. It's possible that a strategy of diversification would be wise and perhaps that is what they are pursuing, but it will take quite a bit more evidence to convince me. How they make use of this acquisition will play a large part in that.
