> Similarly, before Dropbox we had options like XDrive from AOL, WebDAV servers, FTP, iDrive from Apple, and many others. We were awash with crappy software to store our documents on a server and access them from any computer we were on.

Amen! Don't be too hard on third-party vendors, though. Dropbox could only have been created after file-monitoring APIs became commonplace in OS kernels. If I've got my history straight these APIs were introduced because first Apple (Sherlock, Spotlight), then the GNOME guys (starting with Eazel's Medusa), and later Microsoft (after WinFS failed) wanted to do nearly-near-time full-text indexing. I remember that in Linux land these APIs were quite contentious and it took several iterations before they got them right.

I'm not sure if the ideas underlying Dropbox were _that_ unique at the time, but their execution sure was exceptionally good.

Still, some companies _were_ in a position to invent Dropbox before Dropbox did. The obvious ones being Apple and Eazel, since they had products that were monitoring the entire user file system _and_ they were selling WebDav storage!