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I believe that this blog post is absurd, disrespectful and insults the entire Dropbox and Orchestra/Mailbox teams as well as, those at Aol/Techcrunch and Crunch

I believe that this blog post is absurd, disrespectful and insults the entire Dropbox and Orchestra/Mailbox teams as well as, those at Aol/Techcrunch and Crunchfund. Dropbox did not buy Mailbox based on a couple of Techcrunch posts, and they obviously will have done their due diligence before purchasing the company. Dropbox bought Mailbox because, it wants to be more than a storage company and they are looking at diversifying their income streams with the rise of rivals encroaching their territory as well as, ensuring that people stay with Dropbox rather than go to other rivals. Acquisitions of Audiogalaxy, Cove, Snapjoy etc highlight that this is Dropbox’s plans going forward. More often than not, Techcrunch states a disclosure of a Crunchfund investment within the posts that they are writing and although, they may have not followed through with this properly with Mailbox – you can clearly see on the Company Bio linking to Crunchbase that Crunchfund are/were an investor too[1]. Let’s not forget Mailbox is from Orchestra[2], a company which already had hundreds of thousands of users and is a company which won Apple’s Productivity App of 2011[3]. [1] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/orchestra http://www.crunchbase.com/company/orchestra [2] http://www.orchestra.com http://www.orchestra.com [3] http://blog.orchestra.com/orchestra-is-productivity-app-of-2011-in-the http://blog.orchestra.com/orchestra-is-productivity-app-of-2...

tatsuke95 14y ago
>"Dropbox did not buy Mailbox based on a couple of Techcrunch posts, and they obviously will have done their due diligence before purchasing the company." I like Dropbox. But recent history is filled with terrible acquisitions that have you wondering what the lawyers and accountants were doing: Ebay buying Skype. Microsoft buying Danger. Microsoft buying aQuantive. Anyone investing in Color. AOL buying Time Warner. Yahoo! buying Geocities. and these were all huge deals I can think of off the top of my head. The number of small ones is, I'm sure, substantially larger.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  The lawyers and accountants were doing overtime, those are all billable hours. But to make the argument that something is "bad" you really have to know what management had in mind for it. If their goal was go "make it go away" then what looks like "bad" on the outside can be "good" on the inside. If their goal was to get a team to build something they didn't yet have a team that could build, it might also be "good" in a way you and I couldn't see.
  - tatsuke95 14y ago
    >"But to make the argument that something is "bad" you really have to know what management had in mind for it." What they hand in mind is irrelevant to me. All I care about is the outcome. Saying Microsoft bought aQuantive with the hopes to cure cancer in their mind doesn't justify a $6BB write down. It would still be bad.
  - tatsuke95 14y ago
    According to Damodaran's corporate finance class, 60% of acquisitions fail in some for or another.

tatsuke95 14y ago

>"Dropbox did not buy Mailbox based on a couple of Techcrunch posts, and they obviously will have done their due diligence before purchasing the company." I like Dropbox. But recent history is filled with terrible acquisitions that have you wondering what the lawyers and accountants were doing: Ebay buying Skype. Microsoft buying Danger. Microsoft buying aQuantive. Anyone investing in Color. AOL buying Time Warner. Yahoo! buying Geocities. and these were all huge deals I can think of off the top of my head. The number of small ones is, I'm sure, substantially larger.

ChuckMcM 14y ago
The lawyers and accountants were doing overtime, those are all billable hours. But to make the argument that something is "bad" you really have to know what management had in mind for it. If their goal was go "make it go away" then what looks like "bad" on the outside can be "good" on the inside. If their goal was to get a team to build something they didn't yet have a team that could build, it might also be "good" in a way you and I couldn't see.
- tatsuke95 14y ago
  >"But to make the argument that something is "bad" you really have to know what management had in mind for it." What they hand in mind is irrelevant to me. All I care about is the outcome. Saying Microsoft bought aQuantive with the hopes to cure cancer in their mind doesn't justify a $6BB write down. It would still be bad.
- tatsuke95 14y ago
  According to Damodaran's corporate finance class, 60% of acquisitions fail in some for or another.