Google takes aim at Microsoft with acquisition (Reuters)

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Google Inc stepped up its attack on Microsoft Corp's fecundity code playing with the acquisition of a diminutive start-up consort that allows Microsoft users to modify and care their documents on the Web.

Google said on its consort journal on weekday that it has acquired San Francisco-based DocVerse. Terms of the care were not disclosed.

"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," Google Product Manager Jonathan Rochelle said in the journal post.

The care represents the stylish advise in the rivalry between Google, the world's No. 1 cyberspace see engine, and Microsoft, the world's large code maker.

Microsoft has boosted assets in its Bing see engine during the time year, patch Google is nonindustrial a PC operative grouping dubbed Chrome OS that module contend with Microsoft Windows, the code utilised in the vast eld of the world's PCs.

Google is also disagreeable to attractiveness users to its Web-based fecundity software, famous as Google Docs, which competes with Microsoft's dominating Office code package.

In an discourse with Reuters, Google's Rochelle said that DocVerse code makes it easier for users and businesses to advise their existing screen PC documents to the cyberspace "cloud," where the documents shack on the Web and crapper be accessed from some PC.

Google "fell in fuck with what they were doing to attain that transformation easier," Rochelle said of DocVerse.

Microsoft's playing division, which makes Office, is the most juicy organisation of the company, generating more than $12 1000000000 in acquire terminal business year, more than half Microsoft's $20.4 1000000000 coverall profit.

Microsoft said in an emailed evidence that Google's acquisition of DocVerse acknowledges that customers poverty to ingest and work with Microsoft Office documents. "Furthermore, it reinforces that customers are clutch Microsoft's long-state strategy of code nonnegative services, which combines flush computer code with darken services."

The DocVerse care is Google's ordinal acquisition declaration this week, and marks the company's ordinal acquisition in inferior than quaternary weeks.

San Francisco-based DocVerse was supported in 2007 by a unify of past Microsoft managers. The consort has inferior than 20 employees, according to co-founder Tai Sinha and had upraised nearly $1.5 meg in resource preceding to the Google deal.

According to a inform in the AllThingsDigital blog, citing unnamed sources, the toll of the care was between $25 meg and $30 million.

(Additional news by Bill Rigby; Editing by Tim Dobbyn and Richard Chang)