Steve Jobs Wanted To Buy Dropbox

The startup wasn't interested.

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Dropbox, the much-loved standalone cloud storage solution, could have become an Apple product if Steve Jobs had his way, according to a new article in Forbes. The late Apple founder was interested in the startup, inviting founder Drew Houston to Apple HQ for a private meeting in late 2009. Reportedly a fat nine-figure offer was involved, but Houston turned him away wanting to build a big company of his own. Jobs then warned Houston that he was making a mistake.

"He said we were a feature, not a product," Houston tells the magazine. And the rest is history.

Also in 2009, Apple bought another cloud company, the music streamer Lala. And in 2010 they built a massive 500,000 sq/ft data center in North Carolina to house a ton of fancy new servers. This year, Jobs unveiled Apple's own cloud solution, iCloud, which is sort of like an extremely Apple-esque version of Dropbox that's built around iDevices/iTunes and designed to work in the background like magic.

Dropbox, which is device agnostic and can handle any kind of file you throw at it, is still doing just fine, though. According to the Forbes article, the company just raised $250 million in venture capital for an overall valuation of roughly $4 billion.

[Gizmodo]

 

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