I can't imagine Apple or MSFT ever offering something that would truly replace it - anything either does is likely to privilege their own OS over any other, and Dropbox has no reason to do that.
The other reason that services like Dropbox shine, at least for me, is that by providing a cloud-mediated sync solution, you don't have to coordinate a synchronous conversation between the devices in question. That's valuable, especially since it enables easy sync with > 2 devices (which also opens the door to selective sharing).
That always-there aspect is also how Dropbox became the de facto mobile file system for iOS (and Android, maybe? I'm guessing -- I'm an iOS user). It's also the default mechanism for sharing files too big or numerous for email (e.g., Aunt Sally's holiday pictures).
My tl;dr is that while Dropbox's initial value prop might not be earthshaking, it's done what it set out to do very, very well for me since I started using it 8 years ago, and I'm very glad to pay them for their service.
Second: I realize everyone’s experience is different, but the three times I’ve had the misfortune to interact with Dropbox shared files (once in a corporate setting, twice with files shared by acquaintances outside work), it just didn’t work. So the meme that Dropbox is a reliable mechanism for sharing to others confuses me.
Obviously your experience is your own, but I have yet to have a Dropbox sharing event fail for reasons other than user error (typically by unsophisticated relatives or coworkers, so I'm not suggesting at all that this was the root of your problem).
We should probably both be cautious of overgeneralizing from our own experiences with Dropbox, but the general presence of "it's easy and it works" even among the nontechnical suggests that your experience is atypical for some reason. Did you ever figure out the cause?
After all, it was once totally conceivable that a multi-million dollar company would be founded on the basis of, basically, a device driver.
We're still doing that sort of thing, its not a new phenomenon that some crack in the design/methods/ethics of a technology vendor is exploited by some un-controllable third-party. Gone are the days when Microsoft, by way of example, would have waged war and just built-in local- and remote- peer discovery, rsync++, etc. in response to this daring challenger to the hegemony.
I guess, I really do sort of miss that. Dropbox really sucks. I only use it because my friends do.
In what way is Dropbox more guilty of this than any other tool/service provided by a third party?
If you're talking about some sort of decentralized peer-2-peer, the average non-sysadmin non-techie user isn't going to want to leave their laptop up 24/7 as a node to share files.
The lawyers with the legal MS Word docs, and accountants with their MS Excel spreadsheets want to shut down their computer, drive home, or get on an airplane, or go to a meeting that may not have wifi connection.
If we ask users to save it to some sort of store & forward storage so their files are accessible to others (especially with others who are outside their particular company's boundaries) ... well... you end up reinventing an entity like Dropbox.
The trouble is, precisely this argument can be made about every single layer, upon layer, upon layer, of cruft which requires a lot of things to be in place, just to make Dropbox work.
So, I'm sorry, but I don't think you've entirely thought this argument through. Dropbox should be a built-in.
Why isn't it?
Unfortunately, OneDrive is little more than a half-baked clone of Dropbox. The first thing I do after setting up a Windows 10 machine is uninstalling OneDrive.
A universal protocol would only handle the "data in flight". The other issue is "data at rest" which is storage problem.
As analogy, SMTP is a universal protocol and yet email giants like GMail/Hotmail/Yahoo exist. They store emails. Average users don't want to point DNS MX records to their laptops running home mail servers 24/7.
- Dropbox-the-client-software simplifies "data in flight".
- Dropbox-the-cloud-storage simplifies "data at rest".
Since storage costs money (e.g. see Amazon Cloud Drive drops "unlimited" plan), it means there would be conflicting business interests from OS vendors at that infrastructure layer. This why a company that was _not_ Apple/Microsoft /Google/Redhat such as Dropbox was able to fill a gap.
1. Rsync has existed since the birth of filesystems.
2. Rsync will seamlessly sync between devices in the way that Dropbox does without the use of a third party. It clearly does nothing to overcome NAT.
It seems like referencing RSync does nothing to substantiate your claim, which still appears false.
The problem dropbox tries to solve is allowing access to files when either party is not connected to the internet or to grant publicly share a set of files.
I truly believe that Dropbox is a lousy solution to a problem created by ignorance on the part of the OS vendors. There is absolutely no good reason that the computers of today cannot share media seamlessly between themselves, without requiring the use or involvement of an external third party - the only reason its necessary to have Dropbox now, is because OS vendors fell asleep at the wheel and forgot that they're producing Operating Systems.
I think this will change, though - OS vendors are going to catch up to this market, and Dropbox will become less and less important as the OS starts to do its job again, and lead on these kinds of services.