Aaron Levie, the 28-year-old CEO of Silicon Valley startup Box, happened to notice that ex-Microsoft kingpin Steven Sinofsky was returning to the States after a trip to Africa, so he tracked him down on Facebook.

"I think I poked him," Levie says, in his typically impish way.

Sinofsky was quick to respond – "I always respond," he says – and the two soon met up at Box headquarters, just off Highway 101 in Los Altos, California, before walking to Pho Vi Hoa, a local noodle shop. Sinofsky spent years overseeing the fortunes of Microsoft Office, the software giant's ubiquitous suite of business applications, as well as the Windows operating system, and Levie was seeking guidance on the future of Box, a company that has carved out a sizable place inside Microsoft's stomping ground, offering businesses a new breed of applications for the internet age, most notably an online service for instantly sending files from machine to machine.

>It should come as no surprise that Box is now rolling out its own application for creating and editing digital documents, a tool called Box Notes that seeks to race both Microsoft and Google to the future of online collaboration

In the wake of their noodle lunch, Sinofsky signed on as an adviser to the company, which means Box is now tapping the expertise of two titans in the world of digital document editing. The company's senior vice president of engineering is Sam Schillace, the man who drove the creation of Google Docs, the search giant's online answer to Microsoft Word. It should come as no surprise, then, that Box is now rolling out its own application for creating and editing digital documents, a tool called Box Notes that seeks to race both Microsoft and Google to the future of online collaboration – not to mention upstarts such as Evernote and Quip.

Led by Levie and Schillace, Box has built this new-age text editor atop its existing file-sharing service, which, according to the company, is used by about 180,000 businesses and roughly 20 million people. In short, you can now create and edit documents in the same place you share them. Box unveiled the service this morning at the annual BoxWorks user conference in San Francisco, and it's now available to a limited number of people and businesses.

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.

Clearly, the way we deal with documents is changing, and Box wants to ensure this change doesn't bypass the file-sharing service it has spent so many years nurturing. Since Levie founded Box in 2005, during his sophomore year at the University of Southern California, the company has offered businesses a service for sharing documents created on other applications. But now, those other applications are morphing into file-sharers, so it only stands to reason that Box would transform its file-sharer into a document creator.

"When you think about a cloud and mobile world, you have to get much closer to the actual content creation," Levie says, grabbing the hair on top of his head and twisting it around his fingers, as he so often does.

For so many years, we've thought of computer files and computer applications as two separate things. But what's happening now is that the applications are becoming the primary portals to our data, and the notion of the file is fading away. As Levie indicates, you never browse a PC-like file system on your phone. You access your data through applications, and so often, that data resides not on your local device, but on a cloud service somewhere across the net.

"The file system is going away as a concern for normal computer users," says Firebase founder Andrew Lee. "We see a future five years from now where, unless you're a developer, you're not touching a file system. You're touching your applications, and your applications manage your data." Firebase has taken this notion to new extremes, and now, with its cloud service, Box is following a similar path towards the future of data.

Inside the Box offices, Aaron Levie keeps a selection of books he credits as an essential part of his education, offering them to the rest of his staff. Photo: Peter Earl McCollough/WIRED

Sahil Amoli, of the Box Notes team. prepares for a standup meeting. Photo: Peter Earl McCollough/WIRED An empty office wing at Box HQ, during lunchtime. Photo: Peter Earl McCollough/WIRED (left) A cardboard cutout of Taylor Swift adorns the Box HQ. (right) Senior software developer Joy Ebertz works at her desk. Photos: Peter Earl McCollough/WIRED Box employee Erik Kuld plays ping-pong during lunch. Photo: Peter Earl McCollough/WIRED The Box Content Services team during a daily standup meeting. Photo: Peter Earl McCollough/WIRED

Beyond Microsoft – and Google —————————–

Despite Sinofsky's involvement with the project, you shouldn't think of Box Notes as a new version of Microsoft Word. What Sinofsky realizes, perhaps more than anyone, is that the world is moving away from the Microsoft Word paradigm, towards a new reality where documents are created and shared in minutes, not endlessly polished and heavily formatted over hours – or days.

"The whole nature of work is changing," says Sinofsky, during one of his regular visits to Box headquarters. "You're doing everything continuously, and you need different support from your tools. It's not about footnotes and an appendix and a table of contents and things like that. Those things aren't relevant – because the document won't last that long. You'll just keep going."

Box Notes plays into this quick-and-dirty way of doing things, providing a document editor that's more streamlined than Microsoft Word – far more streamlined. "It's more of an Evernote take, rather than an effort to go after Word and Office," says Levie, whose repeated criticism of Microsoft and other old school business-software companies has helped make his name in Silicon Valley. "It's about the idea-stream you're sharing – and less about us going into word processing."

>'The whole nature of work is changing. You're doing everything continuously, and you need different support from your tools' Steven Sinofsky

Though the service does let multiple people edit the same document at the same time, even Schillace plays down the importance of such "real-time" collaboration. "It's relatively rare that users sit down and say: "Let's collaborate together. Let's edit in real-time,'" he says. "If that happens, it usually happens by accident." The bigger point here is that Box Notes lets you create a document and send it to someone else, and the two of you can continue to make changes, whenever you like, without stepping on each other's toes.

As anyone in the document editing game will tell you, that's an unusually hard problem to solve. But in Schillace, Box employs the granddaddy of online document editing. In the mid-aughts, he created a browser-based word processor called Writely, and after Google acquired his startup in 2006, Writely evolved into Google Docs.

Over the next several years, during two different stints at Google, Schillace worked on everything from Gmail to Google Reader to Google Ventures, the company's investment arm, and then, in August of last year, he jumped to Box. He insists that he didn't join the company with an eye on building a tool like Box Notes, that he just wanted to work with Levie and Box chief operating officer Dan Levin, an old pal from his days in an Aikido dojo. "I've thrown him through the air, and he's thrown me," Schillace says. But it's only natural that, after Schillace's arrival, Box would move towards online document editing.

Levie likes to joke that he spent seven years recruiting Schillace. "Can I tell one funny anecdote?" Levie asks, as he discusses his long history with the former Google man. "I doubt it," Schillace quips back. As Levie explains, he first contacted Schillace in 2006, and the two traded messages about a possible partnership between Box and Writely, but then Schillace suddenly went silent – as he negotiated his move to Google.

"We were helping people store files online, and as soon as we saw Writely, we saw that that was a way better way to do things than what we were doing – that there should be a way to take documents and open them up. So we've been thinking about this problem for a long time," Levie says, referring to the sort of document editing provided by Box Notes.

Aaron Levie and Sam Schillace, the senior vice president of engineering at Box and the man who drove the creation of Google Docs. Photo: Peter Earl McCollough/WIRED

The difference is that, all these years later, Box has decided build its own document editor, rather than merely inviting others to plug such a tool its file-sharing platform. And that's telling. Like Dropbox – the popular file sharing operation in the world of consumers – Box offers APIs that let outside applications connect to its operation, but in this case, the company wants to take the lead – a clear indication it believes file-sharing as we know it is changing.

Levie envisions a time when his service morphs into what he calls "an information graph" for businesses, describing this as "all of your corporate documents and knowledge in a sharable, searchable, collaborative form." In order words, he sees it as something like Facebook – but for business stuff, not friends and family. In order for this to happen, he says, his company "needs to able to get to more of your content and more of your knowledge to make it really useful for your business."

Yes, it sounds a lot like Google Docs and Google Drive, the larger file-sharing service that Docs now plugs into, in much the same way Box Notes plugs into Box. But for Schillace, Box Notes is a step even farther into the future. The service takes a more "social" angle, he says, but it's also even simpler than Google Docs, with an eye towards not only more rapid collaboration, but collaboration on smartphones and tablets. The company is currently developing a mobile version of the tool.

"We're getting in the land of 'Please give me something that works well on a smaller form factor and that fits into my life a little better'," he says. "I think of this a platform for experimenting with this kind of stuff, in a business context."

So, Box has seen the future, but not all of it. The great thing about internet services is that they can evolve so quickly, and Schillace views Box Notes as something that will continue to change as people change their way of doing things. "The only thing I know after 23 years of building products is that I'm wrong. Everybody's wrong. I'm wrong. He's wrong. You're wrong. There is something about this product that is wrong, that won't work. But we'll fix it," he says. "I see this as the beginning of a longer conversation."

Levie agrees – but with a caveat. "The only difference is that I think I'm right." It's yet another bit of fun from the young CEO, but he's certainly right about one thing: the computer file isn't what it used to be.