Box.com Melds Google and Microsoft Into Document Engine of the Future | Wired Business | Wired.com

From an extensive Box Notes profile; in other Wired/*Box news, see Inside Dropbox's Quest to Bury the Hard Drive

"The idea is to provide a means of more quickly and easily typing stuff up and sending it to colleagues — and yes, if they like, multiple people can even edit documents at the same time. “Evernote and Google Docs are philosophical peers in terms of the future of how people are going to exchange information and work, trade ideas and share task lists, present brainstorms and put together drafts of projects,” says Levie, sitting inside Box HQ, dressed in his usual attire: jeans, sport coat, orange sneakers. “We’ve built a product on the Box platform that encompasses all that.”
With the tool, Box is riding a trend that extends well beyond even Google Docs, Evernote, and Quip. The swashbuckling San Francisco startup Firebase now offers open source software, known as Firepad, that lets anyone build an application where multiple people can collaborate on docs and even edit them simultaneously, while Google provides application programming interfaces, or APIs, for creating similar tools using the infrastructure that underpins Google Docs."

Box.com Melds Google and Microsoft Into Document Engine of the Future | Wired Business | Wired.com