Dropbox Blows Up the Box, Connecting Every App, File, and Device

In the vast San Francisco loft that Dropbox calls home, there's a Lego room, a life-size plastic shark, and a Golden Gate Bridge mosaic made from disassembled Rubik's Cubes. Chipper millennials who may or may not be worth millions of dollars zip by on scooters and Ripstiks. Coders dress in sneakers, untucked shirts, and ties, just to show how deeply they're submerged in their latest project. And if you wander into the cafeteria, you'll find a chef who once worked at Apple and Google.

There's even a music room, a glassed-in space that looks an awful lot like a recording studio. Ostensibly for 'jamming' after a tough day of work, the room has long been a part of the Dropbox universe, and according to CEO Drew Houston, it gets upgraded each time the company moves offices, beefed up with real amps and instruments.

Houston is himself a musician, and he has an engineer's affection for musical hardware. 'When I first got into guitar, I was terrible because I was just learning,' he says. 'But I had all the pedals.'

And yet, since starting Dropbox in 2007, Houston and co-founder Arash Ferdowsi have taken the opposite approach to running their company. The pair set out to solve a simple, irritating problem and never got distracted. They didn't concern themselves with bells and whistles - or the equivalent of effects pedals. They focused on finding the most elegant way to sync files across devices, so you wouldn't have to email them to yourself. Instead of letting groovy digital stompboxes dazzle them, they practiced their scales and chords until they laid a seemingly unshakable foundation in the fundamentals.

The result is a product used by 175 million people - and a company valued at billions of dollars.

But after all that single-mindedness, Houston and Ferdowsi now want to let their baby sing. Today, at Dropbox's first-ever developers conference, the company is officially launching a new set of coding tools designed to push Dropbox into every corner of your digital life. Not content to stay sequestered inside the box, the company's co-founders are unveiling ways for developers to meld their service with every app on every device you own.

For the first five or so years of its existence, Dropbox was synonymous with its 'magic folder.' Save your files in the Dropbox folder on your computer, and they 'magically' reappear in your Dropbox apps on your phone and tablet and in your Dropbox account on the web. Now, if developers take to the company's new tools, the service will escape the confines of this folder, fusing with third-party apps running on practically every computer and smartphone operating system.

Houston wants Dropbox to become the 'spiritual successor to the hard drive.' He says the hard drive needs to be replaced because so many of us are doing so much computing on devices that don't fit the traditional paradigm for working with files. Users don't interact with files on iOS, Android, or the web the way they do on PCs. Apps don't have 'open' or 'save' options that launch a separate window where you tap through a folder tree.

With its new Chooser and Saver options - the first of a planned family of features the company calls Dropins - developers can make Dropbox the 'open' and 'save' windows in their apps. (For now, the Chooser is available for iOS, Android, web, and mobile web. The Saver is just available for the web and mobile web to start, with other platforms to follow).

'Tom Cruise in Minority Report is not carrying around a thumb drive or logging into Gmail to pick up his attachment.'-Dropbox CEO Drew Houston

For example, the much-hyped Mailbox email app - bought by Dropbox for a reported $100 million shortly after launching - will now be able to send attachments, which neither Apple's native iOS email app nor Google's iOS GMail app can do (except for photos, in the latter case). In the new version of Mailbox, tapping the paper clip icon at the bottom of the new message window opens a list of Dropbox files in the same way clicking the paper clip in the PC version of Gmail opens a window for browsing files. (Yahoo has already incorporated a version of the Chooser in the web version of its email app).

But Houston and company don't want to stop at files. In large part because mobile devices have spawned a less file-centric user experience, much of the data we generate and access doesn't have a separate life as a document. You don't play Angry Birds on your phone and then save your game as a '.ang' file. If Dropbox's gambit works, however, you will be able to pick up the game on your iPad where you left off playing on your Galaxy S4.

'Our dream is to be able to work across all of these walls,' Houston says.

Dropbox may be in a unique position to do just that. For now, the company has no overarching obligations to Apple, Google, Facebook, or Microsoft. While pundits have recommended that some big tech company ought to snap up Dropbox while it's still relatively affordable, Dropbox is in a position where it can layer itself over competing operating systems while being beholden to none. Says Houston: 'No engineer in Cupertino is thinking: 'How do I make this work with Android?'' Leave that thinking to Dropbox.

With something it calls Datastores, Dropbox says it's giving developers a way to make their apps truly cross-device and cross-platform. Datastores allow apps to write data about themselves into Dropbox from one device and read that data on another. At Dropbox's offices, developers showed Wired a simple drawing app they built as a proof-of-concept. When Ruchi Sanghvi, Dropbox's vice president of operations, drew a heart in the app on her iPad screen, the same heart appeared in near-realtime in a version of the app running on the web.

'Nobody talks of their content anymore as 'my files and folders,'' Sanghvi says. Instead, she says, we talk in terms of the content itself: photos, videos, music, games. Taken together, she says Datastores and Dropins transform Dropbox into a platform that enables a 'pervasive data layer' - a way for all your digital stuff to follow you everywhere, regardless of device, operating system, or app.

'This is what's going to make the kinds of things like Minority Report possible,' she says.

Of course, pervasive data in Minority Report powered a dystopian police state and creepily personalized advertising. But Sanghvi - who oversaw the development of Facebook's platform for third-party developers as the social network's first female engineer - says the company has no plans to leverage users' content.

'We essentially let users do what they want with their data wherever they want, however they want it. It's theirs,' she says.

In Sanghvi's vision, Dropbox makes our data more ours than ever before. Take, say, an app for calorie-counting or keeping a to-do list. Today, the data generated in those apps tends to sit in isolation, cut off from the wider world beyond the app itself. Datastores give that data a home-away-from-home in Dropbox that the company says will provide a new measure of portability.

Sanghvi imagines a future in which users could extract the information housed in Datastores from, for example, a fitness-tracking app, combine that with data from a healthcare app, and hand the result to a doctor. In this scenario, Dropbox doesn't just free apps from iOS- or Android-dependence. Instead of just letting you work on that spreadsheet from your office desktop at home on your iPad, Dropbox becomes a data liberator, a transparency tool that finally makes your personal, app-specific information independent.

Whether Dropbox realizes its dream of trans-app ubiquity depends on how well the company can sell developers on the power and possibilities of these new options. Every Dropboxer I asked insists that even the Apple borg isn't likely to block the kind of cross-platform utopia Dropbox envisions. The technical roadblocks would be complex to engineer, since the new Dropbox features operate purely on the app level, they say. Hindering harmony between iOS and Android would require hobbling Dropbox on iOS itself, which seems not worth the alienation.

'People are using these platforms to share and collaborate. They're going to need tools to do that,' says Ferdowsi. 'If Apple is going to ban tools that allow you to collaborate outside the ecosystem, I think that would end up hurting Apple.'

In the meantime, Dropbox isn't satisfied to stay a handmaiden to other technologies, or other technology companies. Though employing only about 130 engineers, Houston and Ferdowsi have assembled a formidable technical team. The roster includes veterans of the key potential frenemies: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft. The inventor of the Python programming language works there.

Also, along with Sanghvi, who was acqui-hired when Dropbox bought her startup, Cove, her co-founder and fellow early-Facebooker also joined the company. Aditya Agarwal, vice president of engineering at Dropbox, was formerly the director of engineering at Facebook. When Agarwal joined, the whole company consisted of Mark Zuckerberg and about four or five other engineers. During Agarwal's time at Facebook, the number of users on the social network increased at least 100-fold, to more than a half-billion users. Agarwal says he decided to join Dropbox because he wanted to be a part of the next thing that he believed had the potential to become as big as Facebook. He wanted to be a part of the next billion-user platform. So he asked himself: 'Do one billion people need this?'

The time is near when the 'pervasive data layer' becomes an expected part of the fabric of everyday life.

He believes they do, and that Dropbox has the chops to embrace them all. 'I hope our product is strong enough that everyone in the world will want to use it,' Agarwal says.

But what happens if they do? What does Dropbox become if it transforms into what Drew Houston calls the 'fabric that ties your stuff together'? What's in it for Dropbox?

To hear the founders tell it, the plan is refreshingly simple and easy to understand for a Silicon Valley striver. The more places Dropbox touches people, the more people will put stuff in their Dropboxes. And the more stuff you put in Dropbox, the more you come to rely on your pervasive data - the more likely you are to pay for more space. Dropbox doesn't say how many of its 175 million users are paying customers, though the company does say those users add 1 billion files to the service every day. Some of those people will need more space.

Still, storage is becoming ever-cheaper. To become the default place you put your stuff, Dropbox knows it has to be first and best. This means doing more than just storage. Becoming the default platform for every digital thing we make and consume isn't just an idealistic vision of the future. It's a business necessity.

'Tom Cruise in Minority Report is not carrying around a thumb drive or logging into Gmail to pick up his attachment,' Houston says. The time is near, he believes, when the 'pervasive data layer' becomes an expected part of the fabric of everyday life. It's just a question of which company builds the best loom for weaving that virtual tapestry. 'It's going to work this way in the future. Why not us?'