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Comment by namank | Hacker News Reader

No. Not thinking the same.

File-sharing is more of a usability problem. Invention of email + attachments solved file sharing a long time ago. Its the integration with your everyday life that has been a challenge up till now and this is what Dropbox and iCloud are solving.

Companies like YouSendIt never became as successful as Dropbox because they were before their time; and when the time came, they failed to innovate instead hoping for people to adapt as they adopt. Except I don't think they did it right.

You don't want to pay for file sharing as a feature; but it'll be part of the infrastructure that runs your life. Its synonymous to when Bill Gates' separated the software and hardware and focused on software. No customer wanted to pay for it; but the companies that made the hardware (IBM, Apple) did want to pay for it.

What does it mean to "solving a problem"?? Every attempt at a startup has and solves some kind of problem.

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I just think the same as you with the YouSendIt, they really did not come anywhere. And these sites(mention above) are only online as it is right know.

It just men there is slot of filetering sites, like rapidshare, megadownload, and i could go on forever, so why are these websites getting funded, when there already are tons of filesharing sites and app free. And filesharing is not that complicated, upload -> store -> share.. But as mention above, they are properly trying to be the hun for other programs.

"upload -> store -> share."

Upload where and for how long? What happens to the files over time? What about huge files and ability to pause/resume upload? What about encryption? What about sharing with more that one person at the time? Will it allow me to preview a file before I download it?

Saying " upload -> store -> share." is oversimplifying as " upload -> store -> share" does not work for anyone who is using file sharing to conduct professional services (think of a law firm with bounced emails because the 5Mb attachment was too big, or a law firm that needs to receive email notification on file delivery etc.)

There is a reason why Law firms sends by snail mail, and I think if they choose to store it online, i do not think they will trust it to a other company, that they do not own, they will either make there own service or use branche-organisation product.

Actually I'd say 90% of the file sharing problem is not yet solved. It won't be until I can attach a 1 GB file to an email message, hit 'send', and have the recipient(s) be able to retrieve it as easily as they could if I'd sent a 1 KB file.

Dropbox does absolutely nothing to solve this problem. They've made a good stab at solving the in-cloud backup problem, but their one-way, account-centric nature makes them nearly useless at the core business of sharing files. There is still plenty of room for innovation in this space. Make large email attachments Just Work(tm) somehow, and you will own the planet.

Absolutely this is a very good point and often over overlooked.

Plus I would argue that up until recently the whole file sharing industry was living by some form of "illegal" filesharing (rapidshare, megaupload, etc). Systems like dropbox are most likely benefiting from the same idea but making the whole thing more "private" among friends and therefore making it less obvious. I still can't see there any substantial market in the filesharing area for normal users outside of the classic movie and music sharing. It is not like we are all now operating with music and video master files and need to juggle 1gig+ data files around.

SkyDrive's integration with Hotmail seems to mostly solve that problem, from what I can tell. You can "attach" an Office doc or image in the email composing interface (just like a normal attachment) and they'll be uploaded to SkyDrive and linked to in the email.

The problem is that you need control over the email clients to really have a shot at solving the problem.

Or your should have them interested in your API (profit sharing?)

What I don't like about Dropbox is that it downloads every file from a common folder (shared with other people from my group) to my local computer, whether I'm interested in it, or not.

It should just give me access to it, in the cloud, not just download everything behind my back and using up many, many megabytes, on my rather limited diskspace. (Diskspace is always limited, no matter how large disks get.)

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