I've personally never found Dropbox to be what I want in a file-sharing device.
Ultimately, I think its really a shame that the OS vendors haven't made 'cloud-based auto-discovery and user-control over publication' a major feature of their OS. The reason we need/want/love Dropbox is simply that the mainstream OS vendors dropped the ball, imho, and got lured away into Web2.0 land when they should simply have been adding these features - a distributed, cloud-based networked filesystem - directly to the OS. Why do I need another custom extension for this, from an unknown startup, when it could as easily be implemented as an OS feature? I think the reason is, the vendors are asleep at the wheel.
I've enjoyed the process of setting up my own cloud services for things like filesharing, using whatever tools I can .. but I sure wish it were just something to 'turn on' in OSX or Ubuntu, or whatever .. without requiring a third-party involvement (Ubuntu One or iCloud = no thanks!).
So I see Dropbox's future as being pretty cloudy, personally. I think the repercussions for American cloud providers, especially, are coming .. the desire for a private cloud is a big itch.
Comments
I've personally never found Dropbox to be what I want in a file-sharing device.
Ultimately, I think its really a shame that the OS vendors haven't made 'cloud-based auto-discovery and user-control over publication' a major feature of their OS. The reason we need/want/love Dropbox is simply that the mainstream OS vendors dropped the ball, imho, and got lured away into Web2.0 land when they should simply have been adding these features - a distributed, cloud-based networked filesystem - directly to the OS. Why do I need another custom extension for this, from an unknown startup, when it could as easily be implemented as an OS feature? I think the reason is, the vendors are asleep at the wheel.
I've enjoyed the process of setting up my own cloud services for things like filesharing, using whatever tools I can .. but I sure wish it were just something to 'turn on' in OSX or Ubuntu, or whatever .. without requiring a third-party involvement (Ubuntu One or iCloud = no thanks!).
So I see Dropbox's future as being pretty cloudy, personally. I think the repercussions for American cloud providers, especially, are coming .. the desire for a private cloud is a big itch.