Apple reportedly made $800 million offer for Dropbox

Fri, Sep 9, 2011

News, Rumors

Founded by MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi as a Y Combinator startup, Dropbox is one of those services that, to borrow a phrase from Steve Jobs, “just works”.

Positioned as a web-based file hosting service that lets users share and download files from friends with alarming ease, Dropbox is insanely easy and convenient to use and, from our vantage point, provides the best way to share large swaths of data with friends.

Now anyone who has ever used Dropbox can’t deny that it works seamlessly and presents an Apple-esque sort of charm and user experience. That said, it’s not too surprising that Apple reportedly made an $800 million bid for the service a few months back.

Now this is all speculative, but Business Insider, citing two second-hand sources, reports the following:

Before file-storage-on-the-Internet service Dropbox raised a huge round at a $4 billion valuation, it underwent an M&A process.

Enterprise software-as-a-service company Citrix and Apple took a long look at Dropbox’s books.

They saw that Dropbox revenues would reach $100 million this year.

Apple, we’re told, eventually offered $800 million.

Dropbox passed, and this summer, it accepted a new round of investment that made co-founder Drew Houston a paper billionaire.

With Apple’s upcoming iCloud initiative, it makes perfect sense that the company would have looked into Dropbox. Again, Dropbox is one of those services that you to use to truly appreciate how brilliant it is. With Apple’s iCloud launch just around the corner, we can only hope that Apple’s in-house cloud offering brings the same level of ease of use and intuitiveness Dropbox users have grown accustomed to.

And as an interesting bit of Dropbox trivia, founder Drew Houston explains the impetus behind the idea for Dropbox thusly:

I needed it badly. I worked on multiple desktops and a laptop, and could never remember to keep my USB drive with me. I was drowning in email attachments trying to share files for my previous startup. My home desktop’s power supply literally exploded one day, killing one of my hard drives, and I had no backups.

I tried everything I could find but each product inevitably suffered problems with Internet latency, large files, bugs, or just made me think too much.

Nothing just worked, so I started hacking something together for myself and then realized it could solve these problems for a lot of other people.

via BI

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