Quickoffice

» see quickoffice.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i missed quickoffice. for whatever reason, in 2003 i was at a turkish internet cafe playing counter-strike and not editing word documents on a palm pilot. in 2008 my phone was a feature phone with a t9 keypad. by 2012 my android handset had a small word and excel viewer i opened maybe once a year. anyway, quickoffice was a company most active in the years where my phone was not interesting. the company existed in plano, texas from 1997 as cutting edge software, founded by jeff musa, and rebranded as quickoffice around the early 2000s.

the product was a small office suite that could open and edit microsoft word and excel files on a phone or a handheld, with powerpoint support added later. honestly, the lineup ran on symbian and palm os in the early years. webos and blackberry came in the middle, then ios and android arrived at the end of the 2000s. for a stretch quickoffice was the default office viewer preinstalled on every palm os device and a large share of symbian feature phones. in fairness, this gave the company millions of license units even when the brand was not consumer-famous.

on june 5 2012 google announced the acquisition, a private price never publicly confirmed but reported in the low hundreds of millions. either way, by november 2012 quickoffice was free on android tablets for google apps customers. by january 2013 it was free for everyone on ios and android. the standalone download numbers spiked once it was free, then went sideways as people realized google docs already did the same job inside the browser.

on june 29 2014 google posted a workspace updates note saying quickoffice was being absorbed into the docs suite. for some reason, the standalone app was removed from the google play store and the apple app store within weeks. existing installs continued to work but no further updates would ship. by the end of 2014 the quickoffice brand was gone from google's product line entirely.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

quickoffice's first market was palm os in the late 1990s. the os shipped without any built-in office viewer, and corporate users who carried a palm pilot needed a way to open the word file an exchange server had just emailed to them. quickoffice solved that with a small viewer in a few hundred kilobytes that could decompress a doc file and render readable text. in those days this was non-trivial engineering. the company added editing later, plus spreadsheet support, then ports to the next platforms as palm faded out (close enough).

by the symbian era in the mid 2000s quickoffice was the assumed answer to "i need to open a word file on my nokia". nokia bundled it with most e-series business handsets. in fairness, the iphone arrived in 2007 with no third-party app support, and when the app store opened in 2008 quickoffice was one of the first paid office apps for ios. it cost ten or fifteen dollars depending on tier. it was a top-ten paid productivity app for years.

~ the absorption ~

google bought quickoffice to fill a gap. google docs at the time was a browser-based product that depended on a network connection. on a phone or a tablet, that was awkward. honestly, quickoffice gave google an offline-capable native client with microsoft office file format support, which docs alone could not match. the merger plan was clear from the press release. the quickoffice rendering engines went into the google docs and sheets mobile apps that started shipping in 2013, and into a slides app the following year.

~ the day it died ~

by june 2014 the standalone quickoffice app was redundant inside google's lineup. the new docs mobile apps had inherited the file format support, the offline mode, and the editing tools (roughly). either way, removing the duplicate was the obvious step. the workspace updates post was matter-of-fact. anyway, no farewell language, no migration path beyond "use google drive". customers who had relied on the quickoffice brand were told to install new apps with google logos on them.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »