Quickoffice

In 1997, long before the App Store existed, a company called Cutting Edge Software was founded by Jeff Musa. The mission was straightforward: to bring Microsoft Office documents to mobile devices. This was the era of Palm Pilots, and the idea of working on a spreadsheet or a document on the go was a novel concept. Their early products, like Quicksheet for Palm OS, quickly gained recognition. The company, later rebranded as Quickoffice and led by co-founder and CEO Alan Masarek, established itself as a key player in mobile productivity. It became the go-to suite for viewing and editing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files on a variety of mobile operating systems, including Symbian, and later, Android and iOS. The pivotal moment in the Quickoffice journey came in June 2012, when Google acquired the company for an undisclosed sum. At the time, Google was working to improve Google Apps and needed to enhance its ability to handle Microsoft Office files seamlessly. Quickoffice had the proven technology to solve this problem. Following the acquisition, Google made the app free and integrated its features into what would become Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Having absorbed its technology, Google eventually discontinued the standalone Quickoffice app in 2014, marking the end of an era for a mobile productivity pioneer.