[cschmidt]

I think it is pretty clear from the wording it is an aqi-hire by DropBox. They are just getting a talented team.

I am very close to launching Predictobot.com, which uses PiCloud for all of its computation. I spent last week moving to Heroku after DotCloud's pivot, and now I'll need to replace PiCloud. The web sure is a stable place.

[ChuckMcM]

"The web sure is a stable place."

This is an interesting variation on this round's "boomlet". So in the previous dot.com boom there were lots of companies who didn't have revenue so they appeared, until the cash ran out and then fell back to earth. Now we can start a company with much less money, but they go poof in an aquihire when things go squishy.

So was it a pricing issue? or a customer acquisition issue? How is it that so many of these companies get into this squeeze? Is it a chicken -/- egg thing where you can't price it to be self sustaining until you get critical mass? Or is it that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are just sucking all the oxygen out of this space?

[BerislavLopac]

Which brings up another observation: when starting a business, sure take advantage of all those practical and inexpensive tools that can help you build your product in record time. But as soon as you start getting some serious traction and money (income or investment), don't hesitate to replace them with something you have more control over. Hm, it would be interesting to see open-source, self-hosted equivalents of useful services like PiCloud and the like.