[ralfd]

> ...as he sat down in his seat, Mr Houston realised that he had forgotten the memory stick that contained all the files. "I was so frustrated because I felt like this kept happening," he says. "I never wanted to have the problem again, so having nothing else to do... I started writing some code [to find a solution], having no idea what it would become." What Mr Houston came up with was the idea for Dropbox - remote storage that users can access online wherever they may be. Within two weeks he had created the prototype, and come up with the name.

Funny. I (and I guess countless people before) would have come up with a remote login via dyndns to my home computer or using ftp to some server. The idea of dropbox seems so obvious in hindsight but we were all blind.

[inapis]

When Dropbox was first demonstrated on HN, people made very similar comments.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

[laumars]

I wouldn't say obvious. The reason you and I would have engineered the kinds of solutions you described (albeit I'd use HTTP(S) rather than FTP(S) because FTP needs to die) is because we would have designed something that didn't require installing additional software on the client machine (I mean other than what you'd normally expect on said machines).

Dropbox was originally scorned on HN because they took a different approach yet history has now proven they had a good idea.

So I wouldn't say it was obvious at all.