Victoria Barret for Forbes:
What Houston does is Dropbox, the digital storage service that has surged to 50 million users, with another joining every second. Jobs presciently saw this sapling as a strategic asset for Apple. 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 (Houston considered Jobs his hero) or the prospects of a nine-digit price (he and Ferdowsi drove to the meeting in a Zipcar Prius).
Jobs went dark on the subject, resurfacing only this June, at his final keynote speech, where he unveiled iCloud… Houston’s reaction was less cocky: “Oh, shit.”
What? Did he think Apple would give up on their cloud strategy without DropBox? DropBox is handy, but is by no means unique. DropBox also has some security issues too.
I think the folk at Siri had a good p.o.v. A lot of these services depend in part on the trust users have in the company behind the service.
I don’t use dropbox. My document access needs just aren’t very dynamic yet. If they become more do, I’ll consider Dropbox if it’s still around.
I do use iCloud. It’s integrated in my device and I trust that Apple won’t need to monetize the data I store by parsing it to create saleable ad info.
LOL!
I view Dropbox and iCloud as two different services. iCloud helps sync up data between iOS devices as well as Mac apps that support it. Dropbox supports more platforms, bringing Linux and non-iOS mobile devices into their equation. Dropbox still has a place in people’s tech lives, they may have just lost a portion to iCloud.
My first thought was – “what did he think Apple would do?” Seems fairly short-sighted of him.
Even with iCloud in existence, I think it wasn’t a bad decision for them not to sell.
Dropbox serves an entirely different purpose than iCloud — at least to me — and these two services will work nicely in conjunction.
For us users it might be both:
Either Apple would’ve dumbed it down, to create a seamless, almost invisible service that is iCloud on the basis of Dropbox’s infrastructure.
Or Apple would’ve built upon what Dropbox had to offer and created a service that replaces both Dropbox and what we know as iCloud right now.