I have a few rules in life. One is to never turn down a $100m+ acquisition offer from Steve Jobs. (Unless my percentage/net would have been too small of course. Which then gets back to the rule that ideally you never want to take outside investors or lose majority equity/control.)
Dropbox Said No To “Nine-Digit” Acquisition Offer From Steve Jobs
61–70 of 99 posts
Re: Dropbox Said No To “Nine-Digit” Acquisition Offer From Steve Jobs
#62I love dropbox (use it daily, but only the free version). To be honest I think this decision will probably be looked on as a mistake. Personally, I'm moving to iCloud soon. The reason for this is that it will enable syncing of the notoriously closed Apps and music that come with Apple. The non-apple crowd will not see this benefit, but once Google or Facebook decide they want to be in the cloud storage game too, Drop…
I think people are taking a very narrow minded view of Dropbox. You're absolutely right that iCloud, potential entries of Google or other big players could hurt Dropbox and be competitive.
However you have to imagine Dropbox is looking beyond "just file syncing" on client computers. Do you think when Jobs re-joined Apple, he was thinking "lets make Apple a better computer company". Dropbox gave an info session/tech-talk at MIT recently (which they do often), and talked about how they want to be the "Filesystem of the internet". With the money they've raised recently, and the ferocious hiring they're doing, you have to imagine they have plans to move into other spaces that might not necessarily be exactly client/cloud file syncing. I'd gander they have other aspirations and ways to make Dropbox as a platform be pervasive throughout the internet. Dropbox can focus on this one thing. Google can offer space for super cheap, but I can't see them attacking this large problem from as many angles as Dropbox can, since it's the "one" thing they do. This is all speculation, but I don't suspect Dropbox is going to sit complacently in the space they're in with potential pressure coming from so many competitors.
Also, iCloud's goal seems to be more to lock users into Apple products rather than be a great file syncing service. Photos off my iPhone get synced to iPhoto, rather than a folder I designate on my computer (ironically, a Dropbox folder). But to be fair, I haven't dived too deep into what I can do with iCloud yet.
Re: Dropbox Said No To “Nine-Digit” Acquisition Offer From Steve Jobs
#63I love Dropbox, but Jobs is right -- they are a feature, not a product. They will be relevant up to the point where operating systems simply makes their functionality a native element of their file system. At least Drew is wise to the fact that they could become an also-ran, so it's not like this will happen to them overnight.
It's a pretty big feature, I'd say. Anybody who was a mac user before 2000 can tell you how painful it was to use a mac when your friends or coworkers had windows. It was horrible. Problems with file sharing between systems created huge network effects for microsoft. It killed the possibility of having a mac for a lot of people. The fundamental problem of compatibility requires not only technological and architectura…
Certainly a big feature, although as platform/os providers integrate similar functionality, that differentiation point for Dropbox will begin to diminish.
But you're spot on with varying OSes being willing to cooperate to allow multiple clients access to shared data stores. Google, Apple, Microsoft and open source all in agreement on file sharing? Right.....
Surely the latest Dropbox investors considered that, and gauged the probability of harmony among the OS providers for the sake of the user. And since Dropbox just closed $250MM in financing, they obviously believe their chances are pretty good. :-)
Re: Dropbox Said No To “Nine-Digit” Acquisition Offer From Steve Jobs
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is all about the product but it's not as if Dropbox isn't facing some very serious competition. iCloud, G-Drive and Skydrive are all concerns. Dropbox's advantage may be being platform agnostic but one has to wonder if Dropbox's fate may eventually be the primary storage of pirates. There have already been stories written regarding the content owners' interest of litigation.
one has to wonder if Dropbox's fate may eventually be the primary storage of pirates That's further reinforced by the existence of Dropship[1] (although I don't know if it still works), which enabled people to get copies of any file in the whole Dropbox network with just its hash, by taking advantage of their deduplication techniques. [1]: http://forwardfeed.pl/index.php/2011/04/24/dropship-successo...
Dropship no longer works.
Re: Dropbox Said No To “Nine-Digit” Acquisition Offer From Steve Jobs
#65I love dropbox (use it daily, but only the free version). To be honest I think this decision will probably be looked on as a mistake. Personally, I'm moving to iCloud soon. The reason for this is that it will enable syncing of the notoriously closed Apps and music that come with Apple. The non-apple crowd will not see this benefit, but once Google or Facebook decide they want to be in the cloud storage game too, Drop…
I think people are taking a very narrow minded view of Dropbox. You're absolutely right that iCloud, potential entries of Google or other big players could hurt Dropbox and be competitive. However you have to imagine Dropbox is looking beyond "just file syncing" on client computers. Do you think when Jobs re-joined Apple, he was thinking "lets make Apple a better computer company". Dropbox gave an info session/tech-t…
I don't disagree with you re: iCloud, as that Apple's MO in all their actions.
However I can only gauge risk based on what I can see. It's possible that dropbox can revolutionize some new space that changes the equation, but this isn't evident right now, nor is it easily foreseen to be imminent. Given that, it doesn't look like a viable strategy for them, at least from my removed vantage point.
Re: Dropbox Said No To “Nine-Digit” Acquisition Offer From Steve Jobs
#66Why not actually link to the Forbes story and not another site's regurgitation of it?
Re: Dropbox Said No To “Nine-Digit” Acquisition Offer From Steve Jobs
#67I simply don't believe this story. If you have $100+ million to throw at as fundamentally simple a product as Dropbox is, you have more than enough to make a good clone of it.
It's not like Jobs can deny it now.
Re: Dropbox Said No To “Nine-Digit” Acquisition Offer From Steve Jobs
#68"Houston cut Jobs’ pitch short: He was determined to build a big company, he said, and wasn’t selling, no matter the status of the bidder" Props to Drew. I don't think many other entrepreneurs would've been as zealous and decline such an offer.
Nine figures buyout? You really do have to believe in your future success to turn that down, especially as a two year old company and long before the current milestones. That kind of money, Drew's payout would have been substantial, enough to bankroll any project he could dream of (or live comfortably forever). He must really believe in what he's doing.
Or simply be lying.
Re: Dropbox Said No To “Nine-Digit” Acquisition Offer From Steve Jobs
#69The right decision, in my opinion. As popular as the are marketed to be, most people don't have iThings.
Re: Dropbox Said No To “Nine-Digit” Acquisition Offer From Steve Jobs
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Operating systems we run Dropbox on at my house: Ubuntu, OSX, iOS, Windows, Blackberry 5. Someday they may all have Dropbox-like functionality built in, and someday after that they may interoperate. Dropbox can stay in their current business a long time regardless.
Given Ubuntu already has that functionality built in (Ubuntu One), and offers Win, Android and iOS 3.1+ clients, we're really not so far off from that being the case already.
So what it has over Dropbox is the lack of Mac OS X? I haven't used Ubuntu One since I tried it pretty early on, and it was nowhere near as easy to use and convenient as Dropbox.