Dropbox vs. iCloud

Stephen Hackett:

iCloud may become a direct competitor of Dropbox’s, but the purposes of the services are different at this point.

Dropbox’s main usage is to sync files; iCloud would have users sync data, hiding the individual files from the user interface.

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.

★ Thursday, 29 December 2011