Dropbox Indeed Balked at Major Acquisition Offer from Apple

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benpatient said:
iCloud is so mac-focused and mac-limited in a way that dropbox has never been, that I just don't see how iCloud can realistically "kill" dropbox.

I use dropbox every day. I take it for granted. When I sit down at someone else's computer, i notice that my dropbox accounts aren't there pretty much right away.

I've got drop box on my macs, my android phones, and my pc.

Apple's solution wants me to buy an iphone and remove all options and choice from my world completely.

But what is the icloud analog to having a customer send you production files via a shared dropbox folder, which then syncs to your phone and your laptop and your work computer automatically? There isn't one. dropbox does this intelligently and seamlessly and QUICKLY. Apple is too worried about keeping everyone in their universe, and most people aren't in their universe to begin with, so the market for dropbox is bigger just from the get-go.
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Exactly. I actually thought iCloud came with the same kind of Dropbox functionality, it wasn't until release that I realised that it doesn't. Until iCloud does what Dropbox can do, I'll stick with Dropbox.
 
miniConvert said:
$800 million. There's no way Dropbox can be worth that much. Its founders must have a whole stack of belief in the technology and its long and viable future in order to have turned that down...

I'd have thought I'd have been wiser to sell out and move on to inventing something new. Exit opportunities like that don't come along... well, ever, for most of us.
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I don't agree. You don't have to quit or throw in the towel just because someone makes an offer. Where would Apple be if, when they were in the tank, they just sold to a high bidder?

Many people who create companies aren't looking to sell it - they create a business because it's something they are passionate about and want to have a legacy.

"Selling Out" upon the first viable offer - no matter how good - doesn't equate to good business. Nor does it mean much to people who don't want to see their dream die or get swallowed up and just another cog is someone else's business.
 
I'd have sold. Thougt I think a part of me would want to say, even to Steve Jobs, "eff you" when he told me my company was a feature and not a product.

The thing is, he's right. Dropbox is great-- but NOTHING will be as good as streamlined integration. All these third party cloud storage services suffer from the same basic problem. You have to actively engage with them. They're not integrated in to the OS. They are, basically, a hard drive in the cloud.
 
The stable of apps that use Dropbox to sync preferences or documents are all probably going iCloud. The area that Dropbox has room to live is group collaboration. iCloud absolutely sucks for groups (pretty much by design). Still, they'll need to do something else because they can't just be the iCloud for groups (I'm mostly ignoring the Windows and sort-of-Linux support because I'm looking at it from a perspective of you have access to both, why would you use x or y...by default if you don't have all OS X or iOS products you pretty much cannot use iCloud in this way).
 
*LTD* said:
Job's negotiation style gave you very nearly all the Apple services you enjoy today.
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Or, this arrogance caused us to miss a lot of stuff we do enjoy. For every feature he allowed, he disallowed 2 others.


*LTD* said:
Clock's ticking. Enjoy Dropbox while you can, and so will I. Before long it might well be redundant.
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Just because it may be redundant doesn't mean we have to switch from it. One thing the online digital age has taught us is that is online services (and even electronic devices, Apple has taught us) are like glue. Once you subscribe to them, it is very cumbersome to switch from their ecosystems. Who here would want to move 5 gb of online data to another service that's just going to perform the same function?

*LTD* said:
They're probably on it as we speak (and so is everyone else.)
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Just like they were "on" MMS and copy/paste. I'll enjoy my storage elsewhere, as I become more entrenched in Dropbox's platform.
 
miniConvert said:
$800 million. There's no way Dropbox can be worth that much. Its founders must have a whole stack of belief in the technology and its long and viable future in order to have turned that down...

I'd have thought I'd have been wiser to sell out and move on to inventing something new. Exit opportunities like that don't come along... well, ever, for most of us.
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The proper valuation of the Dropbox service as it is, is a completely different number than the one for Apple should it acquire DB for the brain trust to integrate with their platform. Just a sayin.

It all depends on the buyer and why they are buying it.
 
ecib said:
What does SS's web interface let you do "so much more of" that DB's does not? I'm curious, as I have not used SS.
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I can sync any folder I please.

I can edit files thru JAVA without downloading and reloading. This is the big one for me.
 
Stella said:
DropBox will continue on regardless of iCloud. Why? With drop box you can load any type of file you want. iCloud is limited - applications have to explicity support iCloud.

There are more potential users for Dropbox than iCloud, so I don't see why iCloud determines Dropbox's future. iCloud is far less flexible.
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Exactly. Plus, as mentioned above, DropBox is platform "agnostic" which is a majors point over iCloud in terms of "potential usefulness". I mean, I love iCloud but you just can't use it with non-apple product (which is in sync with Apple's vision and that's fine) and lets face it, there is still tons of non-Apple product on the market (mobile phone, desktop, notebook, etc.) and it's nice to be able to sync anything (below 300 MB) between any computer.

Right now, I'm happy with both iCloud AND Dropbox.


[edit]
Plus with +250 m, you're good for a little while... http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/18/dropbox-raises-250m-in-funding-boasts-45-million-users/
[/edit]
 
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Tbh I don't trust dropbox, same with facebook. Privacy is an issue for me. I have no reason for such services but I do feel comfortable with a basic backup of my iphone in icloud.
 
Frobozz said:
The thing is, he's right. Dropbox is great-- but NOTHING will be as good as streamlined integration. All these third party cloud storage services suffer from the same basic problem. You have to actively engage with them. They're not integrated in to the OS. They are, basically, a hard drive in the cloud.
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I don't know. I cannot think of a single app that cannot pull documents directly from Dropbox. To me, that's fairly integrated. How much more integrated do you want?
 
Frobozz said:
The thing is, he's right. Dropbox is great-- but NOTHING will be as good as streamlined integration. All these third party cloud storage services suffer from the same basic problem. You have to actively engage with them. They're not integrated in to the OS. They are, basically, a hard drive in the cloud.
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Can't you have both. Can't you have the syncing (seamless) AND allow access to upload/download/share files with directory access. That's where iCloud fails in my book and why I'm not using it.

P.S. - if you're following other threads, you'll note that many want to be able to engage with iCloud as well - especially photostream. Apple NOT allowing the very simple concept of deleting a single photo from the stream is a long term fail. I hope things like that change.

Regardless - it can't be stated enough. Not everyone is Apple-based nor iOS based. Therefor - there will always be a market for Dropbox and other competitors.

iCloud and Apple won't kill Dropbox. Other cross platform competitors, if any, would kill Dropbox.
 
macsmurf said:
Some people like to do their own thing instead of selling out to Apple, Google, or Microsoft. That's a good thing in my book.
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Steve Jobs is on record as saying he respected guys who wanted to build a company and not just get swallowed up by the big guys. Apple could have respected the decision and worked with them in another way, like better Dropbox integration to complement their own plans for iCloud. They worked with Twitter on integration.
 
Let the man speak!

The interviewer is clearly unseasoned. She treats this as if it were a personal conversation; interjecting comments for her own amusement frequently. Comments that don't serve to draw further information from the person being interviewed.
 
*LTD* said:
Clock's ticking. Enjoy Dropbox while you can, and so will I. Before long it might well be redundant.
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From what Apple? That is a joke. Apples product only lock in on iCloud kills its usefulness as Dropbox is complete cross plateform and works on everything.
MS skydrive is the closest thing to it and it can be set to a watch folder as well much like how dropbox is. Just MS never really has pushed it as a big feature and it is not as cross platform.

I find it funny that you seem to think that Apple iCloud serves will kill dropbox. If Apple had bought dropbox it would of been no where close to how good it is. Apple would of killed it with it trying to lock it down and then charge to much for it.
 
FFW said:
Steve Jobs is on record as saying he respected guys who wanted to build a company and not just get swallowed up by the big guys. Apple could have respected the decision and worked with them in another way, like better Dropbox integration to complement their own plans for iCloud. They worked with Twitter on integration.
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Apple doesn't have something they consider to compete with Twitter, though. You don't see Apple integrating Kindle or the Google suite of apps. Google is only as integrated as email and maps (and I wouldn't be surprised if maps goes away...and youtube was always kind of a gimmick app from 1.0 to wow people with video that wasn't over Flash).

Now, I'd like better integration with apps. Something like services would be nice. That way I could do something like tell Siri to put a url from my email into my Instapaper queue. Currently, there is zero way to do that (basically, I want Apple to ripoff the feature from Windows 8).
 
I remember a few months ago while I was out on assignment I wanted to play Borderlands with my brother, but didn't want to import my save file over, so I created a symbolic link using mklink to store the save file into dropbox and on my laptop I did the same thing, ported the save file over to dropbox and bam, I was on dropbox "cloud" for 1 game. Haha. That was my best usage for dropbox.

Now, for all my iOS products, I'd like for them to share the same save file so that when I complete a level on my iPhone it would sync over to my iPad. All the achievements would sync through as well. Is that up to each and every single developer?
 
The Laminator said:
The interviewer is clearly unseasoned. She treats this as if it were a personal conversation; interjecting comments for her own amusement frequently. Comments that don't serve to draw further information from the person being interviewed.
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Well, Forbes is a bit of a joke when it comes to journalistic integrity. IMO.
 
hitekalex said:
There is NO other cloud solution (be it from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, or Apple) that comes anywhere near in usability, flexibility and cross-platform support to what Dropbox offers. Dropbox is the clear market leader in the Cloud Storage space. As long as they keep their focus and execution - there no reason why that should change.

To say that "Dropbox has no future" would be like saying in 2009 that NetFlix had no future because Walmart and Blockbuster decided to enter DVD rental/streaming market. Completely missing the point.
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I always love seeing a reply of quoted message, along with a proclamation that something totally different was posted.

For the record, "not having much of a future", and "has no future" are actually totally different things. I wasn't absolute in my opinion of DropBox's future, it is a personal opinion. With big players (with much deeper pockets) moving into the neighborhood, they are going to have to remain true to their users, and their product as you point out.

If you read into my comment as being a wish that Dropbox goes away, I am sorry to point out that you are incorrect.

I totally agree that DropBox has features and an open standard that make it awesome. I am an avid user of their services, and I constantly share files with friends on my account. I am actually more worried about them going away or being scooped up, than I am hoping for Apple (or anyone else) to be a new leader.

That said, I am also not blinded by my loyalty to see that most of the general public doesn't really care about how open of a platform it is, so long as it works with Windows, Mac, and their phones, it is likely open enough.

I hope that DropBox remains strong, however it's product could easily become a feature from many other much larger companies. The biggest advantage of Dropbox is this product is their only focus, and they have the ability to move quickly, without the politics of the larger, heavier organizations. Hopefully with that, they can stay the highly competitive leader.
 
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Dropbox doesn't directly compete against Apple as it works with both Apple and non-Apple devices. I would guess the offer was more for talent and less for stifling competition, but if the founders have multibillion dollar IPO dreams, there's no way there would be an acquisition price that would make sense for both parties.

Dropbox does seem like the next "zip drive"--very useful for a certain set of people but never truly mainstream. To get where they want to be they'll have to work hard and get some lucky breaks.

For such a talented company, Apple has shown an amazing ability to screw up their online offerings; perhaps if dropbox really stays dominant they might swallow their pride and add some iOS integration a la twitter.
 
When iCloud is inferior to Dropbox,Apple fans says "yet" (refers to previous post) and say that Apple will play catch up soon.

Should Dropbox be in an inferior position prior to iCloud's release, Apple Fan will just say that Dropbox sucks.

Common, see the light. I own a Macbook Air 11", but I dont pray to it.
 
The thing I really like about Dropbox? They aren't Apple, they aren't Microsoft, they aren't Google, and they aren't Facebook.

I don't want one company to store my data, store my searches, to store every aspect of my life on the Internet.

Which is why I also prefer authenticating comments with Disqus than Facebook (if it's necessary.)

Now there are issues with Dropbox, but the biggest one can be solved by not uploading any personal things that aren't encrypted...
 
samcraig said:
Can't you have both. Can't you have the syncing (seamless) AND allow access to upload/download/share files with directory access. That's where iCloud fails in my book and why I'm not using it.

P.S. - if you're following other threads, you'll note that many want to be able to engage with iCloud as well - especially photostream. Apple NOT allowing the very simple concept of deleting a single photo from the stream is a long term fail. I hope things like that change.

Regardless - it can't be stated enough. Not everyone is Apple-based nor iOS based. Therefor - there will always be a market for Dropbox and other competitors.

iCloud and Apple won't kill Dropbox. Other cross platform competitors, if any, would kill Dropbox.
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No, you fail to understand the purpose and way iCloud works.
 
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