Thank you Paul and Jessica for taking a chance on us — we wouldn’t be here without you and YC :) And thank you HN — I’m pretty sure the upvotes on the original screencast helped us get into YC and on Paul & Jessica’s radar to begin with! Even you BrandonM — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 — my favorite HN comment thread of all time :)
It's funny how often that comment—which I made as a 22-year-old undergrad—resurfaces. Someone even reached out to me 2 weeks ago because they wanted to use it in an article as an example of "the disconnect between the way users and engineers see software"! I like to think that I've gained a lot of perspective over the last 11 years; it's pretty clear to me that point #1 was short-sighted and exhibited a lot of tunnel…
However, the fact it has not died and is in fact 'a success' from the capitalist side of things, means what I think about filesharing being an OS service, doesn't really matter. Microsoft and Apple and all the other vendors are asleep at the wheel - but it has to be said that its just a distro upgrade away from being the end of Dropbox for a lot of people.