We want you to have your stuff with you wherever you are, and that requires that we remove anything that gets in the way. How does the apparent simplicity of Dropbox’s user experience emerge from the complexity you must manage? And I met up with Arash through a mutual friend at MIT, and he decided to drop out with a semester left, and we went to California and got to work. So I sulked for about 10 or 15 minutes and then opened up the editor and wrote some code that I thought would solve the problem. But I had that sinking feeling that something was wrong, and I started feeling in my back pocket for my thumb drive, and of course I could just see it sitting on my desk at home. I was thrilled to open my laptop and have four hours where I could finally get some work done. I went down to Boston’s South Station to ride the Chinatown bus to New York.
The breaking point for me was a bus ride. TR: Why did you want to start a company in a field-Internet file hosting-where there were so many competitors? I count as many as 15, including Apple’s new iCloud service. Technology Review’s editor in chief, Jason Pontin, spoke to Houston, the chief executive. The company’s robust growth, together with revenue from the fraction who pay for extra storage and options, has been rewarded by a valuation that various reports place as high as $4 billion. More than 50 million people around the world have been beguiled by Dropbox, which is free to many users. No other service supports so many different systems.
Achieving that simplicity of use-something Houston calls “an illusion”-is very difficult, because it forces the company to wrestle with all the variants of the major operating systems, four Internet browsers, and any number of network file systems. The service lets people use almost any computing device to store files in folders in the cloud as thoughtlessly as they store files in folders in their device’s memory. But one file-hosting service in particular has evoked the kind of devotion ordinarily accorded social-networking services or beloved hardware manufacturers: Dropbox, the product of a startup founded in 2007 by MIT computer science students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. A bewildering number of services let computer and smart-phone users store and share files in the Internet’s cloud.
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