Apple Tries To Acquire Dropbox for $800 Million, Dropbox Refuses(chiphazard.com) |
Apple Tries To Acquire Dropbox for $800 Million, Dropbox Refuses(chiphazard.com) |
More likely, if Apple had acquired Dropbox it would be to funnel Dropbox's talent off to the iCloud team and let Dropbox itself wither away, in which case it was very wise of Dropbox to refuse.
That would be the most expensive talent acquisition at $800 million.
> if Apple had acquired Dropbox it would be to funnel
> Dropbox's talent off to the iCloud team and let
> Dropbox itself wither away
It should be obvious why that's valuable to Apple. They have an iCloud-like service that is very simple to use and is already supported by virtually all iOS developers.
Slam dunk.
Don't think they have a clue what's going on.
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/dropbox
Perhaps you meant to reference their valuation when they last took money?
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/30/index-leads-4-billion-valua...
http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-gossip-on-apples-80...
ChipHazard crappily didn't link to the origin of the rumor.
For extra amusement, read his POS memo and remember the widows and orphans that live more poorly as a consequence of his guidance.
Uh?
There certainly is a Dropbox shaped hole in iCloud. (I will not dare and claim that there is an iCloud shaped hole in Dropbox. iCloud didn’t even have a chance to be successful yet and Dropbox is very successful without anything iCloud offers.)
Now, I have been thinking that Apple’s long term plan is to get rid of the file system (as something the user has to deal with). iCloud and even more so iOS are steps in that direction. Even Apple, however, has to acknowledge that there will at least be a transitional period between now and that future. That’s where the Dropbox shaped hole comes in. Dropbox is (currently) all about the filesystem: There is this folder and you can stick anything at all in it to get it synced across your devices and to be able to access it from the web.
Dropbox has that implemented perfectly. I don’t know whether Apple could copy that. I personally never used it but people have been telling me that iDisk (which was conceptually pretty similar to Dropbox) sucked.
Still, it would be weird for Apple to go off in a direction like that. Not sure whether they are willing to, well, more or less backtrack with iCloud (back to the filesystem).
IMHO, its too bad, since I would of really loved to have seen Dropbox more tightly integrated into iOS. (iCloud will be and it might be my replacement for Dropbox). Though for sharing, I don't think iCloud will have those features for a while.
As a user of Windows, Linux and Android all I can say is "thank fucking god". It would have destroyed a perfectly good cross-platform product.
As a user of OS X and an iPhone, I had the same reaction. One nice thing about Dropbox is that it just works with all my Windows-using friends. It just works through a browser interface. I obviously like some Apple products enough to use them, but I too would hate to see Dropbox acquired by the company. I don't think it would be as bad as Cisco's acquisition of Flip (http://jseliger.com/2011/05/08/will-we-ever-find-out-what-ha...), but I can't imagine such a thing turning out well for Dropbox or for users.