Go to pretty much any college and see how students share files.
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.
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.