| HN Mirror

Could you please not post like this to HN? Your snarky comment is worse than the one you're putting down; he was obviously trying to be helpful and responded sweetly to Drew's reply in the original thread. His real mistake was being unlucky enough to have people posting internet-jerk comments about it 13 years later.

It is probably the most cited HN comment of all time (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). Entire rants have been written about it, and not nice ones. Fortunately the commenter has been a good sport about this over the years, given that it's hindsight fallacy.

People don't remember this now, but before Dropbox succeeded it was widely taken for granted that file synchronization was pointless to work on because no one would ever make a business of it. Joel Spolsky wrote a famous post mocking the idea: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astro... ("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.") In 2007, it was common 'knowledge' that most consumers wouldn't want such a thing and technical people would just roll their own, so a viable business couldn't be created out of it. In BrandonM's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224), the word "app" referred to YC application, not software apps, and you can see in his point #3 the widespread assumption that no one would ever pay money for this.

The surprise was that Dropbox proved the common knowledge wrong, but that didn't happen till later. When YC funded Dropbox, it was because they believed in Drew, not file synchronization, which is also information that wasn't available till later. So if we are to look at that thread fairly, in context, we should see it as a successful conversation with a graceful ending, rather than mocking someone for not knowing the future.