Joel Spolsky hated Dropbox before it was cool

Live Mesh was terrible. Dropbox is great. There is clearly a need for having access to your documents anytime, anywhere.

Please don't editorialize headlines.

Actually the poster managed to miss the entire CONCEPT of Joel's article.

Joel is not ranting against synchronization in general or synchronization a la Dropbox in particular.

He is ranting against over-encompassing architectures that are out of touch with reality. It just so happened that one of the characteristics of Live Mesh was file synchronization, but that is completely irrelevant to Joel's argumentation.

"""But Windows Live Mesh is not just a way to synchronize files. That's just the sample app. It's a whole goddamned architecture, with an API and developer tools and in insane diagram showing all the nifty layers of acronyms, and it seems like the chief astronauts at Microsoft literally expect this to be their gigantic platform in the sky which will take over when Windows becomes irrelevant on the desktop.""""

If anything, Dropbox is the exact opposite of the "architecture astronauts" designs that Joel rants against: it's dead simple, does only a couple of things but does them well, and it is not based on a grande all-encompassing architecture out of touch with engineering reality.