Congrats Dropbox

As long as NAT is the default mostly everywhere we'll be stuck with 3rd parties to interact between users, if only to poke hole in those NATs. You can fire up a local HTTP server on your machine very easily if you want to share a file but it's no use if your IP is not reachable.

Of course there's more to Dropbox than that, you also have 3rd party "cloud" storage which is an important feature, especially if you want your file to remain available to 3rd parties when you shutdown your machine.

> they have turned something that should have been a commodity into a profitable business

Commodity businesses are universally profitable businesses for the survivors. The companies don't stick around otherwise.

Convenience stores, typical pizza places, liquor stores, tons of grocery store products, most office supplies, generic clothing, power adapters, most physical digital storage, brick & cement companies, the 58000 self storage facilities, the world is filled with profitable commodity products and businesses (and they're often very large).

I don't think that comment is necessarily unfair. Dropdox does charge for the service if a user wants over 2GB. I think the more questionable comment is that first point:

>For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

That is the epitome of not getting it.

Drew and Arash went to MIT, where their everyday computing environment was UNIX systems with home directories on AFS. For those who haven't used it, AFS is a networked filesystem sort of like NFS, except with a better authentication model and the ability to support failover on the server side.

AFS, NFS, Coda, 9P, WebDAV, SMB/CIFS, FTP, Windows roaming profiles, AFP, etc. were all around and (to varying levels) built into OSes well before Dropbox. Dropbox was a fundamentally different model: files stay on your local machine and get synchronized, instead of living on the network. The entire idea that live synchronization is the correct approach is almost entirely due to Dropbox's success; any OS designer before 2007 would have said "Yes, we have something as basic as a networked filesystem."

If you're objecting to the fact that it takes a commercial venture to explore and develop these sorts of ideas, I too dislike that we're in that place. But it's true. We haven't achieved a way to develop standard computer infrastructure without capitalism, yes; but we've certainly achieved meaningful technology that did not previously exist that's actually working for people.

(And, also, almost all of those protocols I mentioned were developed by profitable businesses like Sun or Transarc or Apple or whomever, and only made non-proprietary at great effort. The ones that started off with public specs, like WebDAV and FTP, were the worst.)

Probably around 0.06 * 10,000,000,000

Assuming no subsequent investments, dilution, selling of shares, etc.