From $0 to $4 billion
It is the story that makes the Silicon Valley lore. Drew Houston not only founded the ubiquitous Dropbox that every other person is using, not only just got a B Round valuation of $4bn, not only turned down a cool $800 million buy-out offer two years prior, he turned down Steve Jobs.
Makes your knees feel just a tad weak, don't it!
And, for the record, DropBox could not have happened so rapidly without a solid Cloud backbone.
The Calculation
On the heel of my recent musing on the status of OpenStack, it is interesting to see how RackSpace CTO sees RackSpace's relationship to OpenStack as its unofficial guardian.
Apparently, the master plan to dominate the world involves widely deploying OpenStack whereby RackSpace can offer its consulting/management services. Seem reasonable enough, but it also seem to require quite a number of pieces to fall into the right place. More importantly, does this mean that RackSpace will take a more assertive role with OpenStack Foundation in the style of MySQL instead of Mozilla?
And I thought Cloud Computing is all about software
A final bit of noteworthy development. Given the relatively simple computational needs of Cloud Computing and its voracity for electric power, there is an arms race to create alternative chips and architecture away from the mainstream Intel x86 design. ARM chips are a favorite right now, but there are definitely chip shops working on other solutions to be followed by the infrastructure/support for the new chips and/or architecture.
Microsoft was disrupted by the internet as embodied by Google. Now, the other half of Wintel needs to watch out for the next disruption.
Related Entries
* Dropbox gets a $4bn valuation in B Round: https://plus.google.com/u/0/104462346399481715282/posts/P4bKc7cUX6y
* RackSpace's master plan for OpenStack: https://plus.google.com/u/0/104462346399481715282/posts/ZeRHQVheEQ8
* Simpler chips for Cloud computing: https://plus.google.com/u/0/104462346399481715282/posts/DFNx4V35xdm
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