Following iPad release, Google rolls out free Android and iPhone versions of Quickoffice for Apps customers
Google on Wednesday announced the release of Quickoffice for Android and iPhone, available gratis for all its Apps for Business customers. If you fit the bill …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's June 2012 move to bring Quickoffice in-house set up this release: nine months later, the acquisition's first fruit is free Android and iPhone apps for every Apps for Business customer, arriving right behind the iPad version. The pickup across the Google Enterprise Blog, 9to5Mac and AppleInsider shows how much attention a free Office-compatible editor on Apple platforms draws.
It extends a line Google has been building since it shipped mobile Docs access back in 2007 — but with a twist: instead of pushing its own formats, Google is now handing business subscribers native Office file handling on rival operating systems.
First-order effects
- Apps for Business subscribers get mobile viewing and editing of Word, Excel and PowerPoint files at no added cost, making the suite bundle measurably more valuable than the same subscription was last week.
- Microsoft's paid mobile Office distribution now competes against a zero-priced alternative sitting inside a Google subscription that many enterprises already pay for.
Second-order effects
- Pricing pressure lands on Microsoft: if Office editing is a free perk of a cloud suite, Redmond has to justify charging separately for the same capability on phones.
- Apple gains a richer app catalog for iPhone and iPad business use while ceding nothing directly — but each free Google editor deepens Google's foothold on iOS, where it otherwise lacks an OS-level advantage.
Third-order effects
- Office file compatibility is turning from a product you sell into a checkbox feature of cloud collaboration subscriptions, eroding the standalone mobile-office category.
- If the pattern holds, enterprise suite competition shifts from per-app licensing to platform lock-in through bundles — whoever owns the subscription owns the mobile client, regardless of whose OS it runs on.
The trend: Cloud productivity vendors are absorbing mobile Office editing into their subscriptions as a free bundle feature rather than selling it as a separate product.