Drew Huston once turned down an offer from none other than the darling of technology, Steve Jobs. He was firm about his dream of standing in the market and competing with other technology giants. Huston with his co-founder Arash Ferdowsi crossed over 2 million users signing up for DropBox after two years of its establishment. But do you know it was not the original name of the company; then why is DropBox called DropBox?
There you are, read on to know what changed founders’ minds.
Why Is It Called DropBox?
At first, Huston alone founded the company as ‘Evenflow, Inc.’ in San Francisco in May 2007. Within a year the company received funding from Y Combinator with a condition that Huston should have a co-founder with him. So, he started looking for a co-founder and one of his friends told him about Arash Ferdowsi, a computer science student at MIT.
He met and discussed his idea to Ferdowsi and,” got married on the second date,” said Huston about the partnership. In 2008, it officially called DropBox with the domain name ‘getdropbox.com’ but after October 2009, it finally got its current domain “dropbox.com.”
Well, no specific reason was cited for the name; neither did the founders Google nor misspelled the word. The name is the result of an incident that repeatedly occurred.
For Huston losing a flash drive became an event that could have occurred anytime anywhere. It was troublesome but once and for the last time it messed up to its limit. On that day, Huston had to travel four hours from Boston to New York so he decided to code in the meantime. Unfortunately, he lost it again.
Annoyed and frustrated Huston started developing code for a technology. A technology with which files and data can be easily transferred over the web and accessed anytime anywhere. Eventually, it is called DropBox.
In technical terms “It’s a digital storage service that comes with a virtual box where you can sync your files or data on the web and can access it anytime, anywhere you need.”
What exactly DropBox do?
It is a file hosting platform with which digital files can be accessed and transferred over the web. All a user needs is to create an account on the website or app and sync his/her data with it.
In its freemium version, it offers 2 GB of data storage to its users. But with time and need, you can even extend the storage capacity up to 2 TB under its premium version.
Houston once said in an interview,
“Devices are getting smarter—your television, your car—and that means more data spread around….There needs to be a fabric that connects all these devices. That’s what we do.”
To comply with all electronic devices, it is available for Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS, Linux computers, mobile devices (iOS, Android, and Windows phones), and tablets.
In 2016, it collaborated with Microsoft to make it a by-default app of its Windows 10 apps. Besides, the market is full of alternatives such as Google Drive, OneDrive, and iCloud.
Conclusion
DropBox became a verb in Silicon Valley after its years-long success and usability. Once a law student blogged how DropBox saved his graduation degree when he lost his all data one day before the final exam. As far as we have explained why is DropBox called DropBox, what do you like about its service, let us know in the comment box.
