From Wired’s “With Sync Solved, Dropbox Squares Off With Apple’s iCloud”:

In early 2009, just months after Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi launched Dropbox, a service that promised to sync users’ photos, music, and documents across computers, Apple’s MobileMe team suggested the pair come by for a chat. The two MIT-schooled twenty-somethings knew they were in for some discussion about how their little startup was competing with the computing giant, but they were not prepared for what was first off the block:

How did you get in there?

The question was about Dropbox’s integration into the Finder — something Houston and Ferdowsi accomplished by hacking their way in. In order to get highlighted text to accompany a file that had been updated within Dropbox, the founders had to break into the Finder’s processing server and insert their own code.

But despite the breach, the Apple inquiry wasn’t an aggressive interrogation. It was actually an honest inquiry. Even though Apple’s Finder team was working under the same roof for the same company, MobileMe was refused access. Houston’s response came with a smile: “Yeah, it’s kind of hard to do.”

Great article, silly title. Dropbox & iCloud do completely different things.