I have some storage experience and I can tell you that Dropbox is not a new idea at all. Even AOL had something like this. I'm also convinced that they didn't win because of simplicity. However, Dropbox just delivered what they promised.
It was amazing for me to watch companies in "cloud storage" space just not delivering. Their servers were down, clients were using 99% of CPU, etc. Yes it is ok that service has some bugs but these companies were adding features (mobile app, integration who knows what) before even making basic stuff working.
Just look Google Docs. Why they cannot just make that "documents" don't intermittently disappear (you get 404 but after retry they are back) before they change interface. Why? I really don't know.
It was amazing for me to watch companies in "cloud storage" space just not delivering. Their servers were down, clients were using 99% of CPU, etc. Yes it is ok that service has some bugs but these companies were adding features (mobile app, integration who knows what) before even making basic stuff working.
Just look Google Docs. Why they cannot just make that "documents" don't intermittently disappear (you get 404 but after retry they are back) before they change interface. Why? I really don't know.