CloudOn Joins Dropbox | Hacker News Reader

CloudOn Joins Dropbox

cloudon.com

33 pointsminimaxir13 comments

For those interested, someone has been maintaining a list of such acqui-hires:

http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

Is this an acquihire? If not, why is the service being shut down? With 9 mil users and the size of the company, it doesn't seem like an acquihire!

They have an entry for "Why does the service shut down?" [1], but it doesn't say much other than "We will continue to work on our vision of the "reimagined doc" at Dropbox"

I guess Dropbox is soon going to announce new documents editing features.

[1] http://support.cloudon.com/mobile/knowledgebase/articles/489...

It's an acquishutdown.

Always irked by the word "joining" in this context.

The CloudOn staff might be joining Dropbox. The CloudOn company is being bought by them.

"Dropbox buys CloudOn".

What was CloudOn?

Edit: Answering my own question, it seems they were basically an online/mobile .docx-editing platform? Based in Israel, had 8 million users and 85 million documents created.

About page: http://www.cloudon.com/about Cached version of homepage: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UfgepVo...

Looks like they're grabbing up talent for a future Office suite competitor of sorts. Makes sense if they want to differentiate themselves as a cloud storage platform, but I do wonder how that would play into their current partnership with Microsoft as the sole "external provider" for the Office iOS apps.

> current partnership with Microsoft as the sole "external provider"

I don't see that as an special partnership, MS used their public API to integrate Dropbox into their apps. The benefit is more on MS side for Office, since they invited more DB users to use MS Office.

Competing with MS Office... The business acumen in dropbox seem like an all-time high.

They acquired Berlin based startup a year ago https://readmill.com/, which was building ebook reading service.

They specialised in PDF and epub formats.

They use a version of LibreOffice.

Our Incredible Journey

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