They are FolderShare for Macs, a little bit nicer and at a time where more people "get" the need.
Fun Historical note: FolderShare was founded 10 years before DropBox. MSFT paid to acquire FolderShare and then squashed all of the good things about it out of the project.
"...and at a time where more people 'get' the need."
I think this is a really good point. The market-timing was right for dropbox. More people with multiple machines (mostly laptops) so the desire to backup/sync across devices became more important.
I have some storage experience and I can tell you that Dropbox is not a new idea at all. Even AOL had something like this. I'm also convinced that they didn't win because of simplicity. However, Dropbox just delivered what they promised.
It was amazing for me to watch companies in "cloud storage" space just not delivering. Their servers were down, clients were using 99% of CPU, etc. Yes it is ok that service has some bugs but these companies were adding features (mobile app, integration who knows what) before even making basic stuff working.
Just look Google Docs. Why they cannot just make that "documents" don't intermittently disappear (you get 404 but after retry they are back) before they change interface. Why? I really don't know.
Yeah I really don't get it? Google is valuable because (the theory is) you buy advertising and you get more business and you make more money. So the more money you spend on google the more money you make. Ok I get it.
Facebook is valuable because it increases the (perceived) size of your social circle, and maybe you make more friends, maybe you get laid more. Ok I get it.
Dropbox you get synced files? Ok that's useful obviously but so what? It seems like at best a 100m business to me, not a 4b one, what's the angle here?
you must have never had a hard-drive that crashed, or a laptop that got stolen, or had to share a 2gig project with a friend.
2 things people pay for:
- Convenience
- Peace of Mind
I don't pay for dropbox but I'd just like to say that "peace of mind" is pretty valuable.
My friends use it to share pictures and music/movies. We don't have to think about it anymore. That's something.
Lastly, I'm a professional freaking software engineer and I don't know how to get files onto my droid x. Then I remembered dropbox has an app. Well what do you know; put file in folder; file appears on phone..! =)
Because it's insanely simple—which is, basically, what all the other answers boil down to. When I tried Dropbox, I was skeptical: you mean it actually transparently syncs folders from my desktop to a server, and lets me download easily from the server? Yeah, right. There's some catch.
It turns out there isn't. That's simplicity. That's why they "won."
