Dropbox CEO Warns Against Apple’s iCloud

Drew Houston didn’t hold back at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, when addressing the attendees on cloud storage.

The CEO of Dropbox, a service that offers file synchronization and client services in addition to online file storage, warned against buying into cloud services offered by mobile device manufacturers and network operators, claiming that consumers and businesses can easily become locked in, Macworld UK reported.

“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.”

Houston cited ”bizarre limitations” on what these services impose on their customers, and used Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iCloud as an example: that individuals who possess an Apple computer and an Android phone cannot easily share files between the two if they are using iCloud as a base.

It is this kind of self-interested thinking that is stifling progress, said Houston, adding that companies operating in this space need to come up with better ways of working together. ”You shouldn’t have to care about the logo on the back of your phone or computer, it should just work with everything you have. That’s the kind of limitation we want to help remove for people.”