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Comment by diminish | Hacker News Reader

microsoft, canonical, apple and now google; won't any one of the bigger tech players buy dropbox instead of developing something new?

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I hope not. Like Twitter and others before it, I think Dropbox is more likely to succeed and engender trust from users as an independent company.

Dropbox has said that unlike iCloud or SkyDrive, they're the only ones offering a truly cross-platform offering, that doesn't favor any one OS or platform over any other. Selling out to one of the big companies (except maybe Amazon/Facebook) would sacrifice that.

Not to mention, Drew Houston already turned down a 9-figure offer from Steve Jobs so I doubt he's interested in selling.

The asking price is probably too insane. If Instagram is a $1B company, than what is Dropbox?

Dropbox raised $250m at a (rumored) $4b valuation not long ago.

I hope not. I don't trust Microsoft, Canonical, Apple, or Google to provide cloud storage.

DropBox works great for me on OSX, Windows, and a couple of Linux variants. I just can't see Microsoft, Canonical or Apple going out of their way to make things work well across platforms.

And Google Drive probably ties into Google+, which kills it for me.

Curious: why would you trust Dropbox or another small provider any more/less than Microsoft, Apple or Google?

If say, Microsoft bought Dropbox, would you then no longer trust them?

Interested in the reasoning here.

First, since cloud storage is the only reason Dropbox exists as a company I think they'll try harder to do it right. If Google Drive doesn't live up to Google's expectations they'll shut it down like they've shut down all of their other unsuccessful projects.

Second, possibly related to the first point, it seems the other companies are doing cloud storage to sell their other products. SkyDrive ties in with Office Live, Google Drive with Google+, etc.

Given that Google's charging for Drive and not G+, it kind of seems like the other way around.

There's always a risk a company will either shut down a business (Symbian, Wave, MySpace, Delicious), or go out of business (Chumby), or get bought and have their business shutdown (Sidekick, Drop.io). I don't think you can really know the future enough to make product choices based on the chance that will happen.

The fact that they charge for Drive and not G+ doesn't imply that Drive is more important than G+. Looking at everything they have the last couple of months I would argue it is in fact the other way around. Although longer term and not direct revenue, G+ (and it's ad possibilities) is more valuable to them.

The way I see it Dropbox made a BIG mistake not selling to Apple. They have now been marginalized by Google Drive. Dropbox is expensive and doesn't offer any of the great features of Google Drive....there done.

But why? I'm not loyal to Dropbox. Competition is good for the rest of us. I get 25GB free from SkyDrive. I hope the others follow suit.

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