[silvestrov]

Dropbox has 2,693 employees. 37signals has ~80.

I can't see Dropbox having a product/sales that is ~30 times as complex. However, I can easily see an organization that has become overly political.

Dropbox should be run as a small company and not run it as "big tech".

What are all these people doing besides political games?

[saagarjha]

It would be reductive to look at it as a multiplier, but really? You don't see synchronizing terabytes of data for millions of people to not be complex? When if you make mistakes you are losing people's photos of their children or their company's financial charts? With hooks in the filesystem to make this all work?

[silvestrov]

Synchronizing is software that scales well. You need a handful of very good developers, not an evergrowing number.

Look at how few developers that SQLite has. That isn't simpler than the dropbox software.

[jameshart]

The SQLite development team doesn’t run and operate a scaled set of sqlite instances serving 100,000 enterprise customers and 200 million consumer accounts. They don’t have to run a billing and account management system at scale and provide support for a sales and customer service organization. They aren’t responsible for managing an exabyte or so of other people’s data.

The core storage/synching engine of DropBox is pretty simple, sure. Running DropBox is a lot more than just building that piece of software.

[nextworddev]

When your product is basically a wrapper around s3 (figuratively - I believe they migrated), you bet there’s a lot of politics in their engineering org

[brightball]

This sums up the original HN post where several people made fun of Dropbox.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

They’ve done many acquisitions to expand functionality, tons of integrations, APIs, search and they do a very good job when they integrate those acquisitions too.

[silvestrov]

The first post says "this shouldn't be a product at all".

I'm not saying that. I'm saying that it should be a small focused company like FastMail or 37signals.

[brightball]

That’s how they started but it turns out that good syncing storage has a lot of potential integration points to create a more complete product.

[kyawzazaw]

you are comparing the most unique company with Dropbox. bad start