Also, just one note to David Pogue - be careful about giving the impression that Dropbox solves "version hell." It's not a version control system - the user still has to have their own version control system, like his editor did by adding her initials to the file name.
Your average user (even business user) will have no idea what a "version control system" is. Only developers will and they'll recognize that Dropbox only has rudimentary versioning capabilities [1]. There's zero risk of them confusing the two.
The "version hell" issue that David Pogue describes is something that most geeks solved long ago, but is far more common. There are millions of computer users who either don't have access to a file server, or their job requires them to collaborate on file sharing tasks with users that don't have access to the same file server they do. The work flow goes something like this:
* Allison creates a Word document with an agreement in it
* Bob and Mike need to review the document, so Allison emails it to the both of them
* Bob submits his revisions first, so Allison incorporates the changes, then emails the updated copy to both Bob and Mike
* Mike had previously saved the document from his email and had started his edits
* Mike submits the "old version" of the document with revisions, but many conflict with the changes that Bob submitted
* Allison is left with the task of sorting out the differences
For use cases like this, Dropbox is like "OMG it's magic!" to regular users. There's still the issue of editing conflicts (Dropbox doesn't support simultaneous editing), but this is much easier to work around than the game of "telephone" involved with emailing documents.
The moral of the story is that as geeks it's really easy to take our toolset for granted. "Solved problems" for us are a daily headache for your average person.
No, David was kinda right. Dropbox has built-in version tracking. Only 30days of history is saved by default. Of course there are no commit messages, but it happens any time the file is changed, and the web ui presents it in a pretty clear way for non-techy users, by timestamp and author.
I think the specific version-hell he perceives is the where any member of the team does not have the latest version. So in his case it is the auto sync that scratches that itch, and not the explicit version tracking.
As for the "editor's initials" part. I think you might have misunderstood what he meant. The editor did not make another copy with a new name, she just renamed the file, as a signal to the team that her work was complete. Alternatively she could have just communicated by some other means, and left the filename in tact, but this is what they chose.
they sell a "packrat" feature with paid subscriptions for unlimited version history
Hmm interesting. Yea I knew what he meant with the initials thing, I didn't know about the timestamp/author thing in the web app. Can users download old versions?
I like this piece - Dropbox deserves all of the great PR it's getting. My favorite Dropbox quote is Michael Wolfe's answer to this Quora question - http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-tha...
Also, just one note to David Pogue - be careful about giving the impression that Dropbox solves "version hell." It's not a version control system - the user still has to have their own version control system, like his editor did by adding her initials to the file name.