Quote:
Originally Posted by unxmully
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I have a lot of respect for Joel, but he's very wrong with this statement:
"Jeez, we've had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I'm sorry. It seems like it should be. But it's not."
He's so incredibly wrong about this. Anyone with more than one computer, and I'm counting smartphones as computers here, has a fundamental problem of wanting to have their "stuff" on both computers - but it's so mind-bogglingly complex that most people don't even try, or give up trying to articulate what it is they need. Most people have just accepted that they have one computer that has most of their stuff, and if they have another computer, it will have some of their stuff, but if they want to access all their stuff, they have to go back to the "real" computer. This is how most average people think. And then their hard drive fails, they lost most of their stuff, and they're very angry about it.
The web-based hard drive services he's talked about were mostly lame because all they did was give people a place to store a limited amount of their stuff. And getting it uploaded was a slow, painful process that was so hard most people never did it. Hell, I had half a dozen accounts with those web-based storage services and I never could figure out what to do with it because they didn't offer me enough storage space for all my stuff, and what's the point of having only some of my stuff up there? I didn't want to have to manage another process.
When I show someone
FolderShare and set it up for them, they're stunned - the concept of having all their digital photos and music on multiple computers, mirroring each other, is almost magical to them. Throw hosted Exchange into the mix, and you have a multi-device nirvana. Multi-device sync is a hard problem though, and there's a reason why it hasn't caught on with the masses - because no one has done it right yet.
As I said, I respect Joel, but I think he's out of lunch on this particular point. If Live Mesh can be the platform that allows people to use any computer or phone they want, and have all their stuff right there, then it's going to be a huge success.