I don't think Joel got it right in a way that matters. What he said, with emphasis added: "Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files

I don't think Joel got it right in a way that matters. What he said, with emphasis added: "Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application." The first part of the sentence is about the fact that no one cares about such architecture astronaut solutions. He may have gotten that statement right, but it's not the interesting part. The second part is the mistake: he's assuming it's because no one cares about file synchronization. But it's clear from Dropbox and even Apple's cloud solutions that people do care.