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Comment by bradleyland | Hacker News Reader

Spot on. I am incredibly optimistic about Dropbox's future. It constantly blows my mind that home users don't have any file sharing running on their network. The go-to solution is to email files to each other, even while sitting on the same network. When I learned that Dropbox supported LAN sync, I immediately started recommending it as an alternative to emailing files back and forth. Just drop files you would normally email to each other in to the Dropbox folder, and magically it will appear on the other computer. BONUS! If you make changes, they're automatically shared in the other direction. Keep it under 2 GB and you get this for free.

The response I get from users is consistently that of complete astonishment. Registering for and installing Dropbox is, for many people, a more straight forward process than getting file sharing working. Dropbox scratches a very common itch.

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If anything, what blows my mind is that Microsoft has failed that significantly on connecting systems which share a LAN. There should have been something as easy as Dropbox built into Windows, and made known to users, at least 10 years ago.

Microsoft had built in cloud storage, something like live space, or live disk, or something along those lines. It was very similar to dropbox, but for whatever reason it didn't catch on. I know a few people that still use it.

That's the thing - Apple and Microsoft have both had somewhat similar offerings, but in some way they were not as user-friendly, or were not presented to users properly (Apple has iDisk, or something like that).

For LAN use, cloud (external) storage isn't even needed though.

I get the feeling that Apple is preparing another big push into this area. Between cloud-iTunes, the mega datacenter, and rumors of some sort of new iPad sync system they've got plans for sure.

It's a perfect example of the importance of execution. This isn't a new idea, but Dropbox was the first to make it dead simple & reliable.

the reason it didn't catch on is because it was terrible to work with. it did not synchronize consistently. it would detect that changes had been made in multiple locations, then just keep extra copies -- leaving the user wondering why the number of files suddenly exploded. I used it for a bit, and finally gave up because it was too much hassle.

Not sure what the status is now, but for a long time Microsoft intentionally limited the file-sharing (and printer-sharing) capabilities of their "home" class OSes, to avoid cannibalizing sales of their "office/server" class OSes.

From what I remember of Windows 98, it was really simple. If you shared something on the network, it was shared to everyone on the network. No passwords, no permissions, no home groups, everything was just shared. I wish Windows 7 could do this for me.

With Windows 7, I need to connect to a network, customise my security settings so that files can be shared, and even then I need to go into advanced permissions and add a user called 'Everyone' to every folder I share, just so that other people can access them. Sharing on Windows in its current format is unaccessible and difficult.

(Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I'm very computer literate and it's a fight every time I want to share something, so I can't imagine it's easy for 'mum and dad' users)

I had huge problems ever getting LAN sharing set up on Win98. It seemed like the only way was to reboot both of the machines at exactly the same time, plus mystic dance moves, etc. Often one machine could see the other, or you could browse but not access files, the 'network neighborhood' would show then not show the other machine, and so on. Like most of the rest of Win98, it was unstable to the point that one wondered how MS could keep a straight face when releasing it. But then, sometimes it would work with no problem at all.

It "kinda" supports LAN sync.

Files still first need to be transfered to the cloud first before you can sync them over LAN.

At least it was like this the last time I have looked at it (a few months ago).

It would be incredibly interesting if your dropbox machines all ran a bitorrent client that auto shared the syncing between them all.

With logic to determine which machines are closest (in bandwidth)

So that if I have my 5+ machines at home (desktops, laptops and phones, which all have the client on them) - they all see that they are on the same subnet and sync very fast between each other.

Then update the cloud at the same time - in the same fashion... chop all the changes up amongst the machines. (sure, I still have a single pipe via my cable modem - but this would be helpful when I am on work lan too...)

EDIT: it would be great to see an added layer of service on Dropbox such as the old Hamachi personal VPN services...

Eventually - Ill be able to have a completely distributed, virtualized personal network across any machine I have an account...

Windows Live Mesh, an equivalent Microsoft product, has the p2p sync functionality in addition to cloud sync.

http://www.winsupersite.com/article/product-review/how-to-li...

I dual boot most of my machines, so I find anything that is 100% windows only to be less than optimal.

But the tech is interesting.

fwiw, it supports Mac as well.

It supports linux too, I've had it up and running on Mint and Ubuntu for at least 6 months.

Dropbox already takes advantage of the local subnet if it can for synchronization... has for quite a while now.

Thanks, I didnt know this , was pretty obvious for them to do it that way.

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