(2013-02-10) Writely Creator Now At Box

Sam Schillace, creator of WriteLy, is working on Collaboration Ware at BoxNet.

When he started at Google, his team was about 40 people. By the time he left, it had grown to 600. But despite its size, Schillace said, GoogleDocs was never a huge priority at Google because of its minimal effect on the company’s bottom line.... Fast-forward a few years and there’s “not a lot of room for the feral programmer at Google anymore.” “The other technical problem is, ‘what’s the next generation of the web app itself,’” he noted. “Where do we go with that and what does that need to be in order to be successful?”... a bigger challenge might be figuring out how to build a collaboration application in the age of powerful mobile devices and cloud computing... “The interesting challenge is to have one foot in many worlds at once,” Schillace said — mobile, web and desktop, consumer and enterprise... Schillace is inclined to look at what a company like EverNote is doing to enable creation and collaboration “outside of that paradigm of word processor, spreadsheet, presentation.”... With the advent of Evernote and the erstwhile Google Wave, documents have become more abstract, mixing images, text, communications, web pages and whatever else onto a digital Universal Canvas. “Underlying all of this, what’s really going on is the business interaction you want to have,” Schillace said. “The point of the document is you usually either record something for yourself or to have an interaction with another human being. And I think we can gradually start peeling away layers of artifice and try to get down to the raw core of that interaction.”

Hmm, does a Software Forge that has Transclusion and is Mobile-friendly fit the bill?

Sept'2013 update: Box has announced the beta release of a new Co-Editing solution, BoxNotes, integrated with the Box file share-and-sync foundation.