Frankly, I still don't understand why everyone's so excited about dropbox.
Dropbox is to file sharing, as facebook was to social networking as Google was to search.
When I try to IM a person a picture, they may be on any one of a dozen IM systems (almost all of the compatible with Adium) - and my success in DMing them a picture is <10% trying to get through firewall. Email used to be my goto approach, but that took a bit of the spontaneity out of it.
Dropbox gives me the ability to drop an image on our shared folder and "real time" have it pop up on their side. I do this all the time, and it's just one of many, many common uses of Dropbox.
Easily the most useful new utility that I've added in the past three years to my OS X system.
But - your perspective on Dropbox - is precisely why it was so hard to predict - even after using it, who on earth would have know that it would have taken over the file sharing space so quickly? And _everyone_ thought google was going to get into this space much, much earlier.
As it is - on the surface, google offers better value and more space for your money - but I don't have a single friend who has switched over to their shared drive. We've all stayed on Dropbox because of the network effect (we've all got shared files via Dropbox - don't want to add yet another file sharing system to slow down our computer.)
We'll see if that works out in the long term - it certainly did with search.
Cross-platform internet file sharing in a transparent way is a (surprisingly?) hard problem. Before Dropbox there were many companies who had tried to make a success of it and they had all failed[1] in one way or another. (Not cross-platform enough, not seamless enough, reliance on ads for income etc etc.) DropBox succeeded because they took that hard problem and made it look easy.
1. Keeping all my documents in sync between several computers, so that I can pick up work on any one of them at any time
2. Off-site incremental backup
3. Sharing and working on a set of project files with non-technically-minded collaborators
4. Sending and receiving large files
Moreover, it just sits there quietly solving problems 1 - 3 day-in, day-out, and I never have to think about it.
Think about it. Sharing files between 25 club members, using our own bandwidth, our own disk space. And Dropbox thinks we should pay them big bucks for this. For what? Storing our files on their server, insecurely? If they had an option to stop doing that, I would select it.
SO no, it doesn't solve any hard problems for us.
The reason that storing files on their server (and using their bandwidth, as well as yours) is important is that it means I don't have to keep all my synced computers on at all times. That's a big deal for me.
It sounds like yours is another problem, which Dropbox is not well adapted to. Perhaps you'd be better off with PowerFolder or similar.
My problem is, Dropbox scales the cost as the number of people looking at a folder increases. As an Engineer I see that as marketing, their cost doesn't increase incrementally in this case. It seems unnecessary and blocks me.
Btw you would only have to keep 1 synced computer on, some of the time. Not a big deal actually. And why keep my data around on their server after we're synced? Simpler for them I suppose, but insecure for me.
I could try and get everybody in the club to install another tool; might look into that, thx.
I often work on my Macbook on the train, then when I get to the office I switch to a Win7 PC and continue working on those same files. There is zero hassle and I can hardly imagine a better solution. ()
As a bonus I get access to all my files from my smartphone and ipad. And with the ipad being such a pain in the ass to synchronize, you really need some kind of dropbox-like solution.
() - Maybe if you did all your work inside VMWare and had the state of the OS image automatically synced between computers that would be a nicer solution... Then you would not have to close your project files on computer #1 and reopen them on computer #2.