Although not mentioned on the latter's site yet, it seems that Google has acquired Quickoffice, the suppliers of the main Office viewers/editors on most Symbian smartphones for the last six years. With activity low on the Symbian front in the last 12 months and with Microsoft's Office Suite now offered for Symbian, this move doesn't affect any of us users directly, but it's still an interesting move by Google.

Google's Android smartphones have historically been shipped with a variety of Office suites, Quickoffice among them, and one would presume that this move is a precursor to including Quickoffice code in the standard build of Android, or at least in selected Nexus branded products. The skills of the Quickoffice technical teams should also not be underestimated and they may well be called to help out with Google's ever more sophisticated web-based editors and viewers.

From the Google blog:

We're happy to announce that we have acquired Quickoffice, a leader in office productivity solutions.

Today, consumers, businesses and schools use Google Apps to get stuff done from anywhere, with anyone and on any device. Quickoffice has an established track record of enabling seamless interoperability with popular file formats, and we'll be working on bringing their powerful technology to our Apps product suite.

Quickoffice has a strong base of users, and we look forward to supporting them while we work on an even more seamless, intuitive and integrated experience.

We're excited to welcome the Quickoffice team and their users to Google.

In some ways this is the end of an era for Quickoffice and for Symbian, though current products will no doubt remain in place. However, updates to the codebase had been few and far between in the last year and it's fair to say that some users had been getting frustrated with the lack of functionality in Quicksheet in particular, with less than perfect integration with Symbian as it is today - Nokia E6 and E7 users have been the most vocal, expecting Psion-like levels of keyboard and touchscreen integration and being disappointed by Quickoffice's slow progress.

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Update: Quickoffice itself has also now commented on the acquisition:

We are delighted to announce that Quickoffice has been acquired by Google!

When we embarked on our mission to become the world leader in office productivity, we knew we were taking on a huge challenge. We worked very hard to build Quickoffice as a user friendly, seamless and yet powerful way to view, edit, sync and share documents anywhere, anytime. It’s been a very humbling experience to see this vision embraced by our users. 

Now, we are ushering in a new chapter with Google. By combining the magic of Google’s intuitive solutions with Quickoffice’s powerful products, our shared vision for anytime, anywhere productivity can only grow. 

The journey has been nothing short of incredible. Our vision has only become bigger, and our commitment stronger. We wish to sincerely thank our users and supporters over the years; you have our eternal gratitude and we invite you all to join us in embracing this next chapter