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Comment by hemancuso | Hacker News Reader

Honest question to the AeroFS team: is AeroFS ever going to ship, even into public beta? The earliest referenced story on HN is 792 days old.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1538731

If Ars is doing a review of your beta, you should certainly be able to convince yourself there is a MVP in your hands. Why the perpetual private beta? Wouldn't you rather find out if this is something lots of people want and would be willing to pay for?

I would worry you finally ship the thing and realize that you need to tailor it to a different audience. Or perhaps the folk are willing to pay are rather happy with Dropbox and a centralized model.

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Hola, The Ars review (while super awesome) was actually completely unexpected and unsolicited. I realize that we first posted about AeroFS almost two years ago, but we haven't been idle, and we have been releasing invites regularly. Users have also been able to invite other users to AeroFS from day one, and many of them ahve been doing this.

We keep AeroFS in private beta mostly because we have an already overwhelming amount of feedback to work with. We want to make sure that we make the users who are with us today (and who have been with us for the past two years) as happy as possible, before releasing it to the masses.

Cheers, Yuri

(ps. sorry for the late response, today was the last day of one of our interns and we took him out for lunch)

Is there any way to bump one's priority on the invite list? I've been waiting for at least a year.

The problem with this private beta, as I see it, is that you've gotten a sizeable portion of your potential early adopters interested in the product; but now you just repeatedly frustrate them by keeping them out of the beta without even so much as an email update. I've been on your list for years with nothing but radio silence. You might have been better off staying in stealth mode, because now, whenever I hear the term "AeroFS" I just feel irked and disappointed. It's like you're trying to alienate your biggest fans.

If "for years" isn't an exaggeration, then shoot me an email asap so I can see why you haven't gotten an invite yet. We've been sending invites in the order that they come in, and although the backlog is long, I certainly don't think it's in the years :(

I got my "Thanks for signing up!" email via Launchrock on 14 Sept 2011, and haven't got a single email from you since... (email address as per my HN profile, if you want to look it up)

Same story here. Exactly the same date (14 September 2011), haven't heard anything since.

Same date for me. It's really a pity that nothing has been released for so long. Restricting open signups is fine, but the fact that people request invites means that there is definite support for the product, and those people are clearly willing to put up with a few bugs. These are exactly the kind of people who add fantastic value to the product, since you're essentially getting free product testing from people who are already passionate about the product.

The backlog is definitely not being handled in order. I signed up a year ago with my person address and never got back. For shits and giggles, I signed up earlier this year with my work address and got the invite after about 5 months waiting.

Still never got anything on my personal address though.

Meanwhile you can use ownCloud - http://owncloud.org/

Still not perfect, little bit more work needed to install the server part, but it works, is opensource, you can access your files over web browser (mobile apps on the way), new versions ship regularly and as a bonus the sync client apps are written c++/Qt so no annoying java required.

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