Google acquires Meebo & QuickOffice

Google snaps up two new sites/services without much fanfare this month — QuickOffice for an undisclosed amount and Meebo for a rumored $100PHP 5,869INR 8,475EUR 95CNY 728 million. The two acquisitions only came hours apart.

In the past few months, Google has been aggressively upgrading and expanding their services to meet the consumer’s demands and be competitive with other top services which are currently available. They’ve done so by exploring innovative means to make their services more accessible and user-friendly. In their hopes to better their apps, the company has recently acquired two companies who seemed to have proven their worth in their own respective fields.

The first acquisition involved MeeBo, a popular social platform which is commonly known for their IM which supports various 3rd-party messengers like YM, AIM, FB Chat amongst many others. But what got Google’s interest other than its IM offering is the Meebo Bar. This piece of website real estate makes it easier for net surfers to share contents to their SNS. Google feels that Meebo will fit in just fine with their Google+ team and is hopeful that this acquisition will be the much needed shot in the arm for their SNS. With its estimated 62.7 million users worldwide, Meebo will definitely give Google+ a competitive boost in the SNS race.

The next acquisition, which by the way took place just hours after the first, is QuickOffice. This productivity software managed by co-founder and CEO Alan Masarek has been a well-known alternative for Microsoft Office used in mobile devices like non-WP smartphones and tablets. The technology giant is looking to utilize QuickOffice’s impressive track record which includes compatibility across popular mobile platforms and vast network of users amassing to a million worldwide. Google plans to ride the software’s popularity and integrate it to their services such as Gmail, Calendar and Docs.

With these acquisitions, Google has certainly placed itself in a much better position to put a good fight against their technological and social rivals Microsoft and Facebook. Although the addition of Meebo to Google+ may prove to be insufficient to break Facebook’s social foothold, it’s still an incremental upgrade to their service, nonetheless.

As for the QuickOffice purchase, this may turn out to be a more fruitful investment and has a higher probability of producing better financial return than the former. Not only will it boost productivity to its services but because of its compatibility to commonly used OSs (whether computers or smart devices) it may also pose a major threat to Microsoft’s Office Suite. Let’s see how these will all turn out in the future. Feel free to chime in with your thoughts about these recent acquisitions.