BY JASON PONTIN, Technology Review
A bewildering number of services let computer and smart-phone users store and share files in the Internet’s cloud. 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. 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. 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. No other service supports so many different systems. More than 50 million people around the world have been beguiled by Dropbox, which is free to many users. 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.
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