Dropbox is definitely a case where a single person's vision was required to create a revolutionary product. Judging by the comments, leaving it to HNers as a group would have just resulted in a faster usb drive.
"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. "
Actually the thing that's infuriating about Netflix and many of its competitors is the weak or no support for deep linking to content. We don't need channels to curate content if bloggers, etc. can do it themselves.
I think the technology and its usability wasn't the problem.
The problem was, nobody thought people would be so crazy and store their stuff on the other side of the planet (performance) on the servers of complete strangers (security).
Dropbox doesn't really suffer from the first problem since you keep a local copy of everything and people have been trusting complete strangers with their email and bank account details since forever.
I almost choked on my lunch laughing after re-reading that. I remember reading the original thread and actually agreeing with him, without the slightest chuckle. Im amazed at how most people still find it hard to find pictures in their filesystems on their pcs. But think about it, how many people carry .jpg, .jpeg, .png etc file associations in their heads? Hilarious.
> Dropbox is definitely a case where a single person's vision was required to create a revolutionary product.
In the case of Dropbox, I think the main factor was (and this is the exception rather than the regular case) the perfect technical execution, not the vision.
I think a far more insidious fact is that Dropbox fills in a gap left wide open by incompetent OS developers. Its the 21st Century - the OS should be providing such features inherently, without requiring a third party involvement. Maybe HN'ers, at that time, were somehow conscious of this fact, and thus declined to 'see the revolution' that was headed their way. Either way, since there was no other option, Dropbox was "revolutionary" enough to have gained a following.
Dropbox support several OSes though, which is still better than any one OS providing a similar capability natively. In general, the OS should just do what it NEEDS to do, and let applications fill out the rest.
The fact that there are multiple OS's out there means there is a battle going on. Dropbox serves a need that should be being defined by co-existing OS participants. But we see this everywhere in the Application space, so your point is valid, there is just an OS border, and an App border. I think what I'm trying to say is that border moves around a bit, and I'm cranky about that.
Apple has started to do that with iCloud [0] and to a lesser extent, AirDrop [1]. But aside from Apple hardware, iCloud only supports Windows laptops and desktops — no official Linux, Android, or Blackberry support.
