Dropbox for the Rest of Us

Now that iCloud is in full swing, lots of interesting buzz is circulating about its similarity to Dropbox. Here’s a good observation by 512pixels, via Gruber at Daring Fireball.

After its announcement, it occurred to me that iCloud is how Apple would do a service like Dropbox today. If this were 10 years ago, an Apple cloud service might look more like Dropbox itself. The difference being: obscuring, or not-obscuring, the filesystem.

Apple (especially under Steve) has always been about curating the computing experience for the masses. Looking back, it’s amazing how “geeky” the Mac OS used to be; over the years they’ve chipped away at obscuring the geekiness of computing so that at the surface it looks and works like a car dashboard. No one needs to see the engine to drive the car (an analogy my friend Mark used to talk about). The engine is still there, obviously. Brave tinkers and fully qualified engineers can pop the hood to do what they need to do in there. As Gruber pointed out today:

Perhaps not a bad definition of a post-PC device: one with no user-visible file system. Dropbox is very much a PC technology, conceptually, because it is all about the file system. That’s why we nerds love Dropbox on our post-PC devices — it gives us some PC-like control. Sometimes we want files.

Dropbox is a holdover to the old days — one that will continue to be extremely useful for “under-the-hood” guys — whereas iCloud is “Dropbox for the rest of us”.