Well played by all parties involved, IMO ....
Personally, I think this situation was handled quite well on both sides of the fence, regardless of whatever the final outcome is for the iCloud and Dropbox services.
Jobs played his cards elegantly, trying to make DropBox owners uncomfortable that perhaps they really didn't have anything constituting a marketable product, and it'd be best for all parties to sell to Apple.
And kudos to Houston for standing firm in his belief that his company could stand on its own two feet. (Is it just me, or do we see situations all too often in the computer industry today where companies appear to be formed mainly with hopes of getting bought out, rather than with hopes of success on their own merits?)
The way I see it, Apple could have used DropBox in their portfolio because their Internet presence is the weakest part of their business. They build top tier hardware and have a world class operating system to run on top of it. They have several high quality applications to sell people after that, to run on it. But they keep stumbling on everything "web services related" that they've ever done, save the selling of digital content via iTunes or AppleTV boxes.
Apple iDisk is going away with MobileME, and currently, there seems to be no direct replacement for it. iCloud seems to be operating under the theory that by covering all your media (music and video collections and last 2,000 photos taken), system settings/preferences, documents/data from user-selectable applications in their list, and your choice of file/folder backups to the cloud -- they eliminated the need for a "simulated external hard drive in the cloud" that you work with manually.
I'd say that's simply not true, at least for any of us in a multi-platform environment. If you use Linux on one machine, and perhaps a Windows workstation in your workplace, you may prefer using a tool like DropBox to store often-referenced or important random documents -- even IF you still use iCloud pretty extensively.
My experience was, iDisk ALWAYS had some performance problems. In fact, Apple seemed to acknowledge as much and wound up creating a band-aid for the issue, by way of locally caching the content and syncing in the background, invisibly, so it wasn't obvious how long it was really taking to copy your files.
DropBox has a smoother running environment which Apple could have learned a few things from.
I can't say, ultimately, if DropBox will survive in the long haul, though? Maybe they'll continue building out their services too, offering something more like iCloud except platform-neutral?
Gotta love Jobs' attempt, though. It's so measured and confident.
The acquisition will happen (by someone.) All in its own time . . . all in its own time.
Of course, Apple has between now and say, next June, to introduce a Dropbox-like service (that actually works like it should . . . iDisk, I'm looking at YOU) and kill the need for Dropbox altogether.
It's just that at this point, Drew Houston thinks he's Mark Zuckerberg. We'll see if he's right.
