Google said on its company blog on Friday that it has acquired San Francisco-based DocVerse. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
"With DocVerse, people can begin to experience some of the benefits of Web-based collaboration using the traditional Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint desktop applications," Google Product Manager Jonathan Rochelle said in the blog post. The deal represents the latest move in the competition between Google, the world's No. 1 Internet search engine, and Microsoft, the world's biggest software maker. Microsoft has boosted investment in its Bing search engine during the past year, while Google is developing a PC operating system dubbed Chrome OS that will compete with Microsoft Windows, the software used in the vast majority of the world's PCs. Google is also trying to lure users to its Web-based productivity software, known as Google Docs, which competes with Microsoft's dominant Office software package. In an interview with Reuters, Google's Rochelle said that DocVerse software makes it easier for users and businesses to move their existing desktop PC documents to the Internet "cloud," where the documents reside on the Web and can be accessed from any PC.
