Because it's only silly sounding because of hindsight. With today's context of file sync applications being a huge industry, that comment seems silly. But that was the prevailing opinion at the time. Check out this blog post: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astro...
>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.
That's just what a lot of competent people thought back then. It seems hilariously out of touch now.
But it wasn't my opinion at the time, and I didn't hear from those people. I was in middle school, kids were commonly frustrated syncing their homework to/from a flash drive, family members wanted to sync photos, and everyone wanted something like this.
Before Dropbox, the closest thing we had was "the dropbox," a default network-shared write-only folder on Mac. Of course you could port-forward to a computer at home that never sleeps, but I knew that wasn't a common solution. I started using Dropbox the same month it came out.
>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.
That's just what a lot of competent people thought back then. It seems hilariously out of touch now.