Google Edging Closer to Online Office Suite?

December 19th, 2006: Google’s move into office productivity software is rumoured to be taking another step forward this week, with the search colossus allegedly holding acquisition talks with the Korean producer of Thinkfree Office, an online Microsoft Office doppelganger.

According to the Korea Times, the Google acquisition team that spearheaded its YouTube.com buy held two rounds of talks with ThinkFree Corp. last week, with the company’s CEO also reportedly flying in to Silicon Valley on Friday.

ThinkFree says its suite is based on Microsoft’s standards and is closely compatible with Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Google has been slowly building up its online office suite with the acquisition of word processor Writely, and recently the spreadsheet application iRows. These two moves hardly left Microsoft Office quaking in its boots, however, by adding Thinkfree Office to its arsenal Google may have something a little more solid to rock up to the office productivity battleground with.

With its word processor, spreadsheet application, Gmail and VoIP applications, Google is slowly putting the pieces of its online productivity suite together. While it may not be a real competitor now, or in the near future, it may not be too long before a real package emerges. If it acquires Thinkfree, this may happen sooner than we think.

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