Google Challenges MS Office with DocVerse Purchase (NewsFactor)

Google delivered the stylish burst in its effort to wrest curb from Microsoft over duty fecundity with its acquire of DocVerse, a Microsoft Office cooperation startup. The Wall Street Journal reportable the acquire toll was $25 million.

DocVerse was supported in 2007 by past Microsoft executives Tai Sinha and Alex DeNeui. The prototypal creation is a plug-in for Microsoft Office that allows users of the screen code to impact on Office documents.

"DocVerse offers the first-ever creation to genuinely enable real-time distribution and redaction of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel files. Its key plus is that it does not order you to see a newborn artefact to impact by seamlessly plugging into Microsoft Office," the consort says on its scheme site.

Announcing the acquire on a consort blog, Jonathan Rochelle, assemble creation trainer for the Google Apps team, praised DocVerse as a "small, active aggroup of precocious developers who deal our vision, and they've enabled genuine cooperation correct within Microsoft Office. With DocVerse, grouping crapper begin to undergo whatever of the benefits of web-based cooperation using the tralatitious Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint screen applications."

Beating Microsoft

"Google Apps hit been most collaboration, but this module attain it easier for grouping who impact within Microsoft Outlook and Office to take Google Docs," said Greg Sterling, capital shrink with Sterling Market Research.

In their journal announcement, Sinha and DeNeui said they started the consort at a instance when it was decent country that a newborn family for fecundity apps was emerging. "The concern started agitated toward easy-to-use scheme applications, aforementioned Google Docs & Apps, substance a newborn artefact to impact with every kinds of benefits," they said. "However, for the some grouping who ingest screen software, aforementioned Microsoft Office, transitioning to the darken was a challenge."

Microsoft's strategy has been Windows Live Workspace — a artefact to substance online admittance and cooperation tools, but which keeps users unwaveringly in Microsoft's sphere. The code colossus did not substance some artefact to block Office into Google's Docs and Apps offerings, and uploading Office files to Google meant baring discover formatting.

"Unfortunately, today individuals are ease unnatural to attain a pick between those digit worlds," DocVerse's cofounders noted. "Even worse, teams who ingest both products encounter that Office and scheme applications do not endeavor substantially together; most times, teams opt digit creation or the other."

Creating Choice

By feat a Microsoft-facing startup, Google is attractive a bounteous travel toward seducing Office users absent from Windows Live, which has not been disenchanting as the forthcoming of online productivity. In 2009, Sinha said, "Office Live Workspace doesn't wage a feature ordered that comes near to what we offer, making it a slummy individual undergo (and in our calculation the drive for its demand of uptake)."

Sinha and DeNeui praised Google as a consort sworn to choice.

"What impresses us the most most the Google aggroup is that they every deal the aforementioned belief — gift grouping the tools to impact the artefact they want," the cofounders said. "We essentially conceive that Google is digit of the best-positioned companies to genuinely stop the concern of fecundity software."

The prototypal travel module be to "combine DocVerse with Google Apps to create a denture between Microsoft Office and Google Apps," they said.