Jun

19

Google Buys Zenter - On Road to Complete Online Office Suite

June 19, 2007 |

Google today bought Zenter - a Y Combinator startup that didn’t even make it out of private beta before being snapped up.

With this acquisition, Google should be able to complete its Docs and Spreadsheet product with a presentation app soon. Together with Google Gears, that would indeed be a killer app (but still not enough to kill MS Office in my opinion).

What always surprises me about these Google acquisitions, though, is that they happen at all. Shouldn’t all these PhD’s at Google be able to built a presentation app? Quickly? Without much hassle? And then integrate it into the larger product?

You would think Google would be pretty far into the game by now, at the point where buying an app and then integrating it would be more work than just working with what they already got. I think the explanation is in whatTechcrunch’s Nic Gonzalez said about thiss:

Zenter was focusing on the front end of the application, as well as community/sharing features. It complements Tonic, which focused on the back end technology for converting powerpoint presentations into Java objects. Zenter takes a more social look at slide shows, letting users share their projects and incorporate content directly from the web, including Google Images.

If Zenter was mostly a front end app, then integrating it with the Google backend should be relatively easy - and Google isn’t necessarily known as a great user interface company. In this light, I think buying Zenter would make a lot of sense. Just a shame we never got to see it before it got bought, so we will never know how they changed the interface.

More discussion here: TechCrunch, evhead, Google Blogoscoped, GigaOM and 901am

Technorati tags: , , ,

Share This

Related Posts

Comments