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Comment by 51Cards | Hacker News Reader

I think this article is perfectly valid. What everyone here is forgetting is that we are a pretty focused demographic of technical people. If you ask the average CNN user what Dropbox is you'll probably get a blank stare. The fact that an article like this is BEING written is just another sign of Dropbox's success... it may be crossing the tipping point to main-stream media and adoption outside of the tech community. I bet if you looked you would have found something similar about Twitter at some point where social media savvy people were going "WTF? I've used it forever"

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>cloud computing -- that catchall phrase corporations use to describe services delivered via the Internet

With this line they are streets ahead of most pure tech sites in terms of accuracy.

I love Dropbox for not using this horrible term.

Horrible term? Just because it's the catch phrase du jour doesn't mean it's totally meaningless. I get annoyed with the buzz and malapropism just as much as the next guy, but like it or not, cloud computing is a major global phenomenon.

How? What does it mean?

Any way I try to define it(other than how CNN puts it) I end up leaving out a huge chunk of cos that also claim to be into cloud computing. And I am not exCtly sure if anyone is in a position or authority to tell them "no you've got nothing to do with the cloud".

It IS a meaningless phrase in the sense that it's being used.

When I was studying network engineering, "the cloud" used to encompass the broader network environment that INCLUDED the Internet as an extension of your enterprise infrastructure. Now? It's a hyperbolic, singular phrase that is limited to using the internet as an extension of your operating system without fully explaining or at least detailing for the end user why it matters.

Especially in the case of those god.awful Microsoft commercials. In their case, the way it's presented, the cloud is nothing less synonymous with social networking. Change your Facebook status from Windows? That's the cloud. Upload a picture to Flickr? That's the cloud. It's no better than that phase of 'web 2.0' that was nothing more than superficial design elements that included shiny buttons, dropping vowels and slapping the term 'beta' on everything. The web is cyclical and this is the latest cycle.

While that in and of itself isn't BAD per se, it's a phrase that's come synonymous with "rockstar" and "ninja" when talking about hiring developers. A total and complete non sequitur.

It still is a horrible term, as are most buzz words and hypes.

And secondly, like it or not, it is nothing new - not even a new concept. See e.g. grid computing and what Foster et al. describe as "utility computing" in their vision; it makes cloud computing look more like a sub-category.

I have the same feeling about "web 2.0" - it was merely "normal people" catching up with the tech savvy crowd on a large scale.

cloud computing, renting servers/VM's. I'm going to be the Hertz of Servers! Or maybe the AirBnb of computing power!.

lol so true. I was ranting about the overuse of this term a few weeks back: http://rakkhi.blogspot.com/2011/02/why-is-it-cloud-everythin...

Good Chevy Chase reference.

What is fascinating to me is how quickly dropbox spread outside the HN demographic. My 70 year old mother, who was as far from a techical user as one could be, asked me in early 2009 if I used dropbox so she could share some photos with me. That's when I realized they were really on to something. It was just that easy to use, and it was spreading very rapidly in non-technical communities - they had reached a user like my mother within 6 months of public release. Unbelievable, and a real testament to the simplicity and elegance of the product.

Dropbox spread like wildfire at my small university in Germany. Not so much (or not only) among students but among Professors and TAs.

I recently got my dad's large real estate brokerage to start using Dropbox for all of their file sharing. Anyone who's ever worked in or near realty could tell you that the technology in the market is usually 5-10 years (at least) behind where it should be, so I considered this a huge accomplishment.

any product that installs growl per default on my system can not be mentioned in the same sentence with the terms "elegance".

I'm biased because I write for Fortune Magazine, but you put this perfectly. To prove your point, when I wrote about Twitter in Fortune in August, 2008, which was one of the first general business press articles about Twitter, I was well aware that 1) all the cool kids knew about it and 2) the rest of the country, Fortune's readers, did not. Here is that article, which seems a little quaint now: http://money.cnn.com/2008/08/06/technology/true_meaning_of_t...

Spot on. I am incredibly optimistic about Dropbox's future. It constantly blows my mind that home users don't have any file sharing running on their network. The go-to solution is to email files to each other, even while sitting on the same network. When I learned that Dropbox supported LAN sync, I immediately started recommending it as an alternative to emailing files back and forth. Just drop files you would normally email to each other in to the Dropbox folder, and magically it will appear on the other computer. BONUS! If you make changes, they're automatically shared in the other direction. Keep it under 2 GB and you get this for free.

The response I get from users is consistently that of complete astonishment. Registering for and installing Dropbox is, for many people, a more straight forward process than getting file sharing working. Dropbox scratches a very common itch.

It "kinda" supports LAN sync.

Files still first need to be transfered to the cloud first before you can sync them over LAN.

At least it was like this the last time I have looked at it (a few months ago).

It would be incredibly interesting if your dropbox machines all ran a bitorrent client that auto shared the syncing between them all.

With logic to determine which machines are closest (in bandwidth)

So that if I have my 5+ machines at home (desktops, laptops and phones, which all have the client on them) - they all see that they are on the same subnet and sync very fast between each other.

Then update the cloud at the same time - in the same fashion... chop all the changes up amongst the machines. (sure, I still have a single pipe via my cable modem - but this would be helpful when I am on work lan too...)

EDIT: it would be great to see an added layer of service on Dropbox such as the old Hamachi personal VPN services...

Eventually - Ill be able to have a completely distributed, virtualized personal network across any machine I have an account...

Windows Live Mesh, an equivalent Microsoft product, has the p2p sync functionality in addition to cloud sync.

http://www.winsupersite.com/article/product-review/how-to-li...

I dual boot most of my machines, so I find anything that is 100% windows only to be less than optimal.

But the tech is interesting.

fwiw, it supports Mac as well.

It supports linux too, I've had it up and running on Mint and Ubuntu for at least 6 months.

Dropbox already takes advantage of the local subnet if it can for synchronization... has for quite a while now.

Thanks, I didnt know this , was pretty obvious for them to do it that way.

If anything, what blows my mind is that Microsoft has failed that significantly on connecting systems which share a LAN. There should have been something as easy as Dropbox built into Windows, and made known to users, at least 10 years ago.

Microsoft had built in cloud storage, something like live space, or live disk, or something along those lines. It was very similar to dropbox, but for whatever reason it didn't catch on. I know a few people that still use it.

That's the thing - Apple and Microsoft have both had somewhat similar offerings, but in some way they were not as user-friendly, or were not presented to users properly (Apple has iDisk, or something like that).

For LAN use, cloud (external) storage isn't even needed though.

I get the feeling that Apple is preparing another big push into this area. Between cloud-iTunes, the mega datacenter, and rumors of some sort of new iPad sync system they've got plans for sure.

It's a perfect example of the importance of execution. This isn't a new idea, but Dropbox was the first to make it dead simple & reliable.

the reason it didn't catch on is because it was terrible to work with. it did not synchronize consistently. it would detect that changes had been made in multiple locations, then just keep extra copies -- leaving the user wondering why the number of files suddenly exploded. I used it for a bit, and finally gave up because it was too much hassle.

Not sure what the status is now, but for a long time Microsoft intentionally limited the file-sharing (and printer-sharing) capabilities of their "home" class OSes, to avoid cannibalizing sales of their "office/server" class OSes.

From what I remember of Windows 98, it was really simple. If you shared something on the network, it was shared to everyone on the network. No passwords, no permissions, no home groups, everything was just shared. I wish Windows 7 could do this for me.

With Windows 7, I need to connect to a network, customise my security settings so that files can be shared, and even then I need to go into advanced permissions and add a user called 'Everyone' to every folder I share, just so that other people can access them. Sharing on Windows in its current format is unaccessible and difficult.

(Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I'm very computer literate and it's a fight every time I want to share something, so I can't imagine it's easy for 'mum and dad' users)

I had huge problems ever getting LAN sharing set up on Win98. It seemed like the only way was to reboot both of the machines at exactly the same time, plus mystic dance moves, etc. Often one machine could see the other, or you could browse but not access files, the 'network neighborhood' would show then not show the other machine, and so on. Like most of the rest of Win98, it was unstable to the point that one wondered how MS could keep a straight face when releasing it. But then, sometimes it would work with no problem at all.

I think this article is perfectly valid.

Of course it is. My bigger surprise is that it doesn't feature what I now think of as the ultimate Dropbox evangelising line: "It's a folder. That syncs".

[ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2153046 ]

There's this tunnel vision that propagates in highly specialized communities like HN. Stepping back and viewing things from the bigger picture is a skill that is highly underrated. That being said, from my personal observations, Dropbox is knocking on the door and about to have a push outside of the core tech community. This article is just another sign that Dropbox is about to make a big push.

Forbes wrote a story on Dropbox last summer. Interesting to compare the two takes.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0628/technology-file-shari...

My mom is using Dropbox. That says it all to me.

I agree, this will be big for dropbox and they deserve the acknowledgement. However I think a lot of us here feel the same way, which you can deem as somewhat childish. Its the sentiment "we were here first".

Dropbox wasn't the first such product and you can argue better ones exist out there. What they have done is make a product with little or no friction to get up and running across multiple devices. That is the power of their product. It is super easy to use and difficult to break. A lot of companies can learn from their success and focus on user experience.

My Son's elementary school principal sends the PTA newsletter out via email with a link to it in his Dropbox. He couldn't figure out how to attach it to the email. I think Dropbox may be a bit more well known outside of the "techie" crowd more than you think.

well, the article is in tech section. for someone to read or write a tech article on cnn and not know about drobbox is a serious WTF

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