I wonder how many people that initially thought/said that they wouldn't need/want/use Dropbox are actually using it now. Would be particularly interesting to know what reasons convinced people who didn't believe it would work to end up using it themselves. Particularly, would be cool to know if it was due to lack of understanding of the product, lack of a clear enough pitch, or something else that established the wrong expectations.
When first shown it by a friend, I didn't want to use it because I was ideologically only using open source stuff, and servers I have control over. I carried on using Unison and some dodgy shell scripts.
Some years later, I got a free 60Gb Dropbox account with a new Samsung phone. It seemed a good way to sync my music and photos, and to let me access text files on the phone.
I'd meanwhile got fed up with my hand made scripts, and tried a few other commercial backup solutions, and got fed up with them all. So Dropbox seemed not a bad part to a backup strategy to use from my desktop as well.
I think this year's privacy news on the Internet has shown my original view was correct. And Drew has shown that a mature, usable, cross-platform syncing client is nevertheless something I use!
And therein lies a fascinating fact about Dropbox. Drew made the tradeoff between convenience and security/ownership one that convenience won out, particularly for a lot of people that from the outset were not expecting it. I think Dropbox's adoption in the smartphone world has been one of the most ingenious partnerships. I had pretty much the same experience in that I really only started looking at Dropbox as a serious solution to me when my Samsung phone shipped with a free account (+ I got a whole lotta free space through my university finishing high in the space race).
I'm not a daily linux user myself, so what particularly interests me is what Dropbox's adoption rate is like in the linux world. This seems to me to be the toughest nut to crack, since most linux users are power users in the sense that they're savvy enough to setup their own Unison/rsync etc. system.
My conclusion after thinking about Dropbox more is that it's a testament to the fact that to the majority of people convenience wins out over most other things (so long as the execution is bang on).
As a linux user (though I wouldn't consider myself a power user) I shopped around for a long time to find a cross-platform cloud backup solution.
After poking at a lot of the other options out there, Dropbox ended up being The One. The ease of use, lack of (unnecessary) IU (I'm looking at you, SpiderOak), and general un-buggyness after some time of trying out the free account sold me on it.
Since I started paying for Dropbox, I have become concerned about privacy and have encrypted my more sensitive data with Encfs. There have been some other companies started in the last year or so that I'm considering (Copy looks nice, and I want to see what appears based on http://camlistore.org/).
Roll-your-own backup systems are cool and all, but I've got shit to do that's not file management.
