2arrs, 2ells

30th October 2008

Post reblogged from Marco's stuff with 3 notes

Sync

Fraser Speirs nails the problems with multi-computer sync, concluding:

It leaves me a bit glum that we, as an industry, have pushed on this for so long and are still hurting users daily with complexity and failure.

I’ve also been very disappointed with sync, although not enough to give up the incredible performance and capacity of my home and work Mac Pros. Until I can get an affordable 250-500 GB SSD in a laptop (probably at least 3 years from now), I’ll never be satisfied with laptop performance enough to use it as my primary computer.

But good sync makes most laptop limitations less relevant. If someone could offer reliable 2-way sync for some key applications (iTunes and iPhoto would be huge), especially if they incorporated basic versioning and backups, they could make a lot of money.

The original post is great - sync sucks (and gets even worse when you try to go cross platform). I disagree with Marco about there being a business opportunity here. Speaking very broadly, there are two types of customers:
* Casual users, who either don’t need/want sync (only one computer) or are satisfied with DropBox.
* Techie users, who are very likely to have insane storage needs (i.e. the OP, with his 300 GB library) which leads to long sync times, relatively demanding diffs, and costly cloud storage.

In the not so distant future, simple sync is going to become more important for casual users (i.e. more netbooks, smart phones). And as cloud storage gets cheaper, the cost of a useful sync for techie users may drop to a point where there’s a potential profit margin.

Source: marco