Google acquires Quickoffice and Meebo

Google must keep acquiring to avoid stagnation, says Ovum's Tony Cripps

Google has acquired mobile productivity suite Quickoffice and has entered into an agreement to buy social media developer Meebo.

Quickoffice is an application that enables users to view, create and edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files on their mobile or tablet devices. Its CEO and founder, Alan Maserek, confirmed the acquistion in a blogpost.

Meebo is a US-based company that focuses on driving user engagement across the web. The consumer internet company also posted confirmation of its acquistion on a blogpost.

Ovum analyst Tony Cripps believes that although the two acquisitions may not seem linked, they form part of Google's broader strategy.

"Google is always on the lookout for a new tool to allow it to deepen its engagement with both end users and third parties. If you look at historic movements of Google in terms of acquisitions, it is completing a few every month and is always trying to fill out a missing bit of functionality [in its portfolio].

"In some cases the functionality would be an entire application, in others it might be building out a more rounded offering in a specific area and I think that is where the Quickoffice purchase comes in," he suggested.

Cripps said that although Google could already offer some similar functions using GoogleDocs via mobile, Quickoffice will enable Google's users to engage more with the Microsoft Office suite and other mobile tools. By buying the productivity suite, GoogleDocs could better compete with Microsoft.

"You can expect Microsoft to integrate Office-type tools on the PC and mobile in future so it makes sense for Google to have similar areas of functionality," Cripps said.

Cripps said that the Meebo acquisition was slightly different to Quickoffice.

"If you were looking at it strategically, Quickoffice is part of a longer-term play of building up functionality across core areas. Meebo is more of a tactical play relating to its existing business, which is about engaging advertisers and generating revenues from those advertisers," said Cripps.

However, he was quick to emphasise that the two acquisitions remain linked.

"If you don't have huge numbers of users using your core products then it's difficult for advertisers to justify spending the sort of money that they do, to advertise to your users. These things grow in proportion to each other. [When the portfolio grows] it becomes more attractive for third parties to be involved in as it becomes self-perpetuating," he said.

According to Cripps, Google is trying to create a proposition for "the whole ecosystem", which involves end users, application developers, content providers and advertisers.

"Google appears to be putting together a broad, well-integrated portfolio of applications and services that come together and create a proposition for many of those users which they wouldn't want to leave," he said.

Cripps said such deals are vital to Google's continued success.

"The risk that a company like Google faces is stagnation, which would be a bigger risk to its long-term future than the fact that it continues to invest in areas to broaden and fill out its portfolio.

"MySpace is an example of an online company that didn't do this very well, and Yahoo didn't put investment in to create self-perpetuating ecosystems based on network effects. Facebook on the other hand does this quite well," he concluded.