[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.