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Comment by tedunangst | Hacker News Reader

If you want to watch Steve Jobs call out Dropbox by name: http://www.apple.com/apple-events/wwdc-2011/ and skip to 1:22:15.

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Quote:

  "Now some people think that the cloud is
  just a hard disk in the sky. You take a
  bunch of stuff and you put it in your
  Dropbox or your iDisk or whatever, and
  then it transfers it up into the cloud
  and it stores it, and then you drag
  whatever you want back out on your other
  devices. We think it's way more than
  that -- and we call it iCloud."

All Steve is saying is he thinks they have a better idea for how the cloud should work. I don't see anything remotely similar to "vowing to kill" any particular service. I think his quote misunderstands the beautiful simplicity of Dropbox, but that's about it.

Most charitably, you could argue that when Steve has previously said words to the effect of "we think we've done something better," entire industries were occasionally upturned. For the CEO of Dropbox, to hear that phraseology used in their direction, I can imagine how they might interpret it that way.

I didn't watch the video to see Jobs saying this, just reading from the parent transcript, but can we be sure Jobs was actually referring to Dropbox here? And not the default shared folder that ships with OS X called 'Dropbox'? (Which many people had automated to back up dropped files to a remote server in the past).

Unlikely, as the built-in Drop Box isn't anything to do with cloud, it's just a way to allow people to copy files onto a networked computer without authentication.

one could say that Houston's bayesian perception of those words were a little different.

He looks just so incredibly ill, but you just have to admire his moxie for getting up on stage and doing WWDC. He was probably terminal metastatic at that point... but he never gave up.

I agreed with what a lot of Jobs said, disagreed with much more of it, but his dedication is deserved of some immense praise and respect.

It's so sad and inspiring to see him in such a state and still have the willpower to do the WWDC like that.

Yeah, it's sad to see someone use their last few breaths to threaten to kill somebody else. Only in the tech industry would this be considered a sign of a successful life.

He was not threatening to kill someone. He was proposing to take marketshare from another (very successful) business. Maybe he used the word "kill" but it definitely wasn't in reference to a person.

Come to think of it, he's an obvious troll, not worth an answer...

That did cross my mind, but his/her history looks legitimate. I think it's just an instance of the tendency that some people have to overly personify businesses.

Of course, I could have just been responding to the language in the headline, but... nah, how likely could that be.

If there's a troll in this particular cave, it's the author of the misleading headline, not me.

Threaten to ... "kill somebody else"?

For one, Dropbox is not a person you know.

Second, all he said if that they (Apple) want to do something better.

Apple apparently doesn't think i'm an important enough demographic to share their content:

"Streaming video requires Safari ..., or QuickTime 7 on Windows."

Shrug.

Apple's page worked fine for me in Firefox. Also, it's available on YouTube. Apple hasn't (to my knowledge) ever objected to the redistribution of their keynotes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjelKEE3LSI

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