Both Google and DocVerse made their announcements Friday afternoon, with each noting that transitioning to cloud document storage and collaboration has been somewhat of a challenge for Office users. "Unfortunately, today, individuals are still forced to make a choice between those two worlds," reads the DocVerse blog post. "Google’s acquisition of DocVerse represents a first step to solve these problems."Google says that current DocVerse users will be able to continue using the service as usual, but that new signups have been closed until the company is "ready to share what's next." This is no doubt a foreshadowing of Google's plan to integrate DocVerse's capabilities into Google Docs, which allows users to collaborate simultaneously on Google-hosted word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation documents.
The move is just another step in Google's strategy to chip away at Microsoft's dominance in the productivity space. Of course, there are other ways for Office users to share documents online—SharePoint is a popular solution among businesses, for example—but the functionality is still quite different from what's offered through Google Docs. The DocVerse acquisition, combined with Google's recently announced file-storage capabilities, will help beef up Google Docs to the point where it will be even harder for small businesses to resist signing up for Google Apps.
Source: Arstechnica.com
