[gwbas1c]

Hindsight is 20-20; but I suspect that they anticipated that a Microsoft acquisition would give them a much better career, and product longevity, than the other buyers.

Example: I was a lead for Syncplicity's desktop client. Many of the pieces of our product were better than the initial versions of OneDrive. Yet, the reality was that most of our customers used us to edit Office documents. Today, Office integrates with OneDrive much better than we could. (Microsoft made changes in Windows and Office to support OneDrive, we would have needed a much larger team in order to do the same.)

In the case of Powerpoint, it plays a lot more nicely with other Office products, (and also plays nicely with OneDrive.) That wouldn't have happened if someone else bought it. Most likely, because Microsoft had so much money, they could have made their own presentation package that was "good enough" and eventually market forces would favor it due to the smoothness of their product line.

Obviously, for me, it would have worked out better if Microsoft bought us and turned us into OneDrive! It would have also worked out better for me if Google bought us and turned us into the Desktop portion of Google Drive!

[pianoben]

I was just thinking about Syncplicity this morning, and found your comment. What a trip! Looking back, it feels like a completely different world. Hope you're well.

You're right about MSFT's long-term platform advantage. File sync is intimately related to filesystem internals, and NTFS is their walled garden - just the same as Office. We bet way harder on Google Docs but kind of missed the point there.