Google makes Quickoffice for Android and iOS free for all

I agree with you that Google is moving into an area Microsoft used to be in with IBM, but I feel like Google, while it does nice things like this, is similarly going to the same location. There's nothing stopping from other companies from coming up with something similar; the problem for now is adoption.

I'd like to find a document editor outside of the major competitors like Microsoft and Google, but to be honest, the others are frankly terrible by comparison. When that changes, at least in the document area, Google is going to rethink what they're doing or buy them out (which is also possible).

The one thing that ties all of these services together for now is Gmail. Because it serves as a single login, it makes transition to other Google owned products easier. Besides being good at the services they provide, this is the real grease in the wheels that makes the whole machine run.

We're already seeing other services crop up to fill the niche YouTube is filling. Vimeo, for example, is actually quite good. While it doesn't have a lot of the silly videos and stupid clips YouTube is famous for, it's got a lot of creative people making beautiful content. But tying Vimeo to a document editing platform?

We're not quite there yet.

>"I'm not saying that they are ALREADY "the" platform, I'm saying that they are trying to be, and are slowly becoming just that.

>If you try and measure what portion of the internet is made up of Google's services/products/infrastructure and what portion of your own personal device usage depends on those services, would you still think this isn't something to worry about?

> Also, something about capitalism, words that have little to do with it... and quickoffice is an example of that.

> On the other hand small companies will accept large buyouts.

> Capitalism is all about monopolies isn't it? So 2+2 = 'obvious point you should be getting'

> Schmidt Quip

I understand your point, and to some degree I agree that it's worth thinking about, but certainly not worth lamenting over. Expanding infrastructure and buying up companies in areas of interest are obvious choices for a successful company.

Capitalism is about competition, not monopolies, and as long as Google has competition in the form of Amazon/Microsoft/etc. there's no point wasting time worrying about a potential future monopoly on "the internet".

Imagine explaining this to your insert-technologically-inept-relative-of-choice.

"No no no, if it's a Word file you need to click on the hollow yellow-blue-and-green circle to edit it, if it's a native google document you need to click on the hollow yellow-blue-and-green hexagon to edit it."

"You don't know what type of document it is? No problem, you can tell by... Open it up in one of the two apps and tell me what the file extension is. The file extension. The three of four letters at the end. Wait a sec, forget that, native google docs documents don't have file extensions."

["Well, does the icon look like--no, never mind, the icon is the same for both, four white lines in a blue square." - I was wrong about this, word files do have a different icon]

"Umm, well, open it in one of them, and if you can't edit it, open it in the other one."

"Hold on, I'll drive over..."