Dropbox Acquires Mailbox ⇒

Dropbox founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi on their company blog after acquiring Mailbox today:

We’re all looking forward to making Mailbox even better and getting it into as many people’s hands as possible.

Congrats to all parties involved, seems like a great fit.

I don’t really like Mailbox, the app, but I do love Dropbox, the company. I’m interested to see where this goes, though I’m wary.

For one thing, I don’t understand why Mailbox was free to begin with. Other than being bought, what was their monetization plan? And now that Dropbox has them, how do they plan to make it profitable?

The bigger, more fun question, I think, is what sense does it make for Dropbox to own a product that is currently built on top of Gmail? Sure, Mailbox will probably add IMAP support in the future, but for now it’s Gmail only, which means Dropbox isn’t in control of the core product. Unless, of course, they roll out their own email product. Dropbox has the storage and scalability needed to release a killer mail product, something that truly is revolutionary in this space.

Or maybe they just like the app. In any case, thank goodness Google didn’t buy Mailbox.