CloudOn

» see cloudon.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The first iPad shipped in 2010 with no way to open a Word document properly. Apple sold you Pages, which could import a .doc and would quietly rearrange it, and that was fine until you sent the file back to a colleague who opened it in actual Word and found the tracked changes gone and the tables broken. For about four years this was the central unspoken problem with using a tablet for work, and a lot of money went into trying to solve it.

CloudOn's answer was the blunt one. It ran the actual Office binaries on its own servers and streamed the interface down to the tablet as pixels. You got Word and Excel as they really were, rendered by the real engine, operating on files pulled live from your Dropbox or Box account.

The free iPad app arrived on 3 January 2012 and went straight to number one on the US App Store, both in free apps overall and in productivity. A day later the company declared it sold out and pulled it from the store, because the servers could not take the signups. It came back on 5 January and passed a million downloads inside five months, which tells you how badly the gap was felt.

It kept going to nine million registered users, and the company described itself at the end as a top ten productivity app across 120 countries. The engineering sat in Herzliya and the business address in Mountain View, on more than $25 million raised from backers including The Social+Capital Partnership.

I was a graduate student through most of this and my documents lived on a laptop, which is where the whole problem goes away. The tablet office question belonged to people who had been handed an iPad by an employer and still owed somebody a formatted report. That was not the equipment I had.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the thing it was waiting for ~

Everyone building in this space in 2012 knew exactly what would end them, and the only open question was the date. Microsoft shipped Office for iPad on 27 March 2014. It was free to view and edit on the device, and it ran locally instead of streaming a desktop from a datacenter in another country over hotel wifi.

There was no competing with that, and CloudOn did not pretend otherwise for long. The company pivoted toward a lighter document editor of its own design, which is the move a startup makes when the original product has been taken away from it. By late 2014 it had stopped accepting new users.

~ the acquisition ~

Dropbox announced the deal on 21 January 2015. No price was published, though the Wall Street Journal reported it as Dropbox's largest acquisition by headcount, with about thirty people crossing over. The service was given eight weeks of notice and switched off on 15 March 2015, with every registered user emailed about it.

What Dropbox wanted was legible from the structure of the deal. It was moving from a place where you kept files toward a place where you worked on them, and it had bought Hackpad nine months earlier for the same reason. CloudOn had spent three years learning how to put an editor on top of stored files. The Herzliya office became Dropbox's first in Israel and the base for its hiring in the region.

~ what replaced it ~

Today cloudon.com redirects into a Dropbox marketing page about productivity features, which is an unusually honest piece of URL routing. The team's work went into Dropbox Paper and the document preview layer, and the Israeli office outlived the product it came with by years.

The streaming trick itself disappeared completely, and it deserves a word. Running an entire Windows desktop application in a datacenter and shipping the screen to a tablet was, in 2012, an extremely expensive way to open a spreadsheet. Companies now sell that exact architecture as a serious product category. CloudOn was doing it for free to nine million people on 2012 bandwidth, and it was the only way anyone could think of to get a real Office file onto a real tablet.

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