Dropbox partners up with Microsoft
Dropbox has announced a new partnership with Microsoft. Ilya Fushman of Dropbox notes that over 35 billion Office documents, spreadsheets, and presentations are stored in Dropbox today, and the two companies clearly would like to turn that reality into a better experience.
As a result, soon users will be able to edit Office files from Dropbox, and access Dropbox files from Office. Here’s a screenshot of Dropbox files in the iPad Office app.
And here’s the new option to edit documents from the Dropbox app.
This is a smart move by Microsoft, perhaps heading off Dropbox from rolling out its own Office docs editors, like Cloudon and others are doing (see CloudOn rolls out mobile Microsoft Word compatible co-editor), and which is where I thought the company’s Project Harmony was headed.
If Microsoft is becoming so open to partnering, maybe it’s intending to have many partnerships like this. Or, alternatively, perhaps this is the start of a much closer relationship with Dropbox, or an outright acquisition. It would be a better use of Microsoft’s money that building more Surface tablets, that’s for sure.

