Have you had enough of Google? If not, then here is one more! Google is going to acquire DocVerse, which has the capabilities of Microsoft’s Live Workspace. Besides just having the similar capabilities, DocVerse has go further by allowing online collaboration tasks without requiring to check out and then check back in to sync the documents.
Microsoft’s Live Workspace allows users to sync their documents (i.e., Microsoft Word, Excel, etc.), but users have to check out and check back in to see the differences and avoiding conflicts of change collisions. For now, in this sense, DocVerse is more advance in this area, because users don’t have to waste time to manually check out and check back in to see changes in the documents, and so the collaborations can be a lot smoother (but even this will eventually be available in Microsoft Office 2010). To be clear, DocVerse is only available for users who are using Microsoft Office, because it’s an extension with online collaboration features to enhance Microsoft Office users’ experiences. Let say you are using Open Office (open source software) to create documents, DocVerse is not going to work for you.
Why DocVerse is valuable to Google? It’s hard to admit this but in reality, Microsoft Office is still dominating the world in documents arena, and so by buying up DocVerse, Google has the ability to allow Google’s fans to do what they like — that’s to use Google Doc or not, and use Microsoft Office 2010 instead. Smart move for Google, because DocVerse allows Google to weather the storm of Microsoft Office 2010. The acquiring process is still going on, but if everything gets through, DocVerse may receive around $25 million (assumed figure).
Vinh Nguyen
