Dropbox CEO criticizes Apple cloud lock-in

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston has warned against buying into cloud services offered by mobile device manufacturers and network operators, claiming that consumers and businesses can easily become locked in. Speaking at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Houston said there is a common pattern of thinking, whereby companies that build phones or networks believe that they can also build a cloud service and bolt it on to their existing offerings. "The question is not so much can you do that as is it worth the effort? We save more than one billion files a day and connect half a billion devices, so if you think of the air traffic control of that, the margin for error here is pretty low," said Houston. "You talk about a billion files - that's more than there are tweets on Twitter. And it's not 140-character snippets, this is your wedding photos and your tax returns and your work stuff; it's the most important information that you have. Doing that at scale, doing it reliably, doing it securely is really challenging." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here