Dropbox will be in business by acquisition. How about Microsoft acquiring dropbox? Their onedrive is not as good as dropbox and will surely help in their cause.
"In 2009, Steve Jobs wanted to pay more than a hundred million dollars for Dropbox. As Houston later told Forbes’ Victoria Barret, when he politely turned down his hero’s offer, Jobs declared that Dropbox was a feature, not a product."
>Replace your iCloud abomination with Dropbox when the time comes.
Sure, but if they did who says they will let you write files directly to Dropbox?
They'll probably have you store your stuff in a hundred different crappy SQLLite databases tied to iNamed applications on your phone and Macbook, just like they do now.
If Microsoft and Apple weren't able to build good alternatives, what makes people think that they won't fuck up an acquisition? Clearly storage for them isn't a priority. So I don't get it. But then I wasn't much into sports either.
Building something is hard. Writing a check is easy. Apple could easily make the payout contingent on a smooth integration. Apple could even have a foreign subsidiary purchase Dropbox, thereby allowing for full use of its external profits it hasn't brought back to the US due to taxes.
That's the benefit of cash. It solves almost every problem.
They have rules to prevent this. See IRC Section 956. In essence, the use of a foreign sub to acquire a US company would be treated as a deemed dividend back to Apple.
I'm not a tax expert, but I think dropbox would have to be a foreign company in order for them to purchase it with foreign cash and avoid tax problems.