DROPBOX IN THE MIDDLE

How Dropbox is doing what no other company can - unite Apple, Google and Microsoft with a single folder.

In 2002009, a young developer named Drew Houston found himself sitting in Steve Jobs’ office. Jobs had asked Houston and his partner Arash Ferdowsi for a meeting in Cupertino, to talk about buying the two founders’ fledgling company.

But Houston told Jobs that he wasn’t selling, not even to Apple -he was determined to build a company, no matter what. Jobs smiled and told them he would be going after their market, and that their company was “a feature, not a product.”

Dropbox - the fledgling company built around a ‘feature’ - has since exploded into a tech behemoth; said to be worth between US$5-10 billion, with around 175 million active users saving more than a billion files daily.

In June 2011, Apple announced iCloud, their new cloud syncing service to replace MobileMe. But developers have been vocal about their difficulties syncing their apps using iCloud. Daniel Pasco, CEO of Black Pixel studio, wrote that “we spent a considerable amount of time on this effort, but iCloud and Core Data syncing had issues that we simply could not resolve.”