Hacker News Reader

Comment by oldgregg | Hacker News Reader

Look for the G-Drive in 2012 or 2013. It will be a piece of engineering genius that nobody will use. Over-engineering is Google's achilles heal and Dropbox is exploiting that brilliantly. Microsoft and Apple are irrelevant-- they are committed to closed platforms and they haven't demonstrated any competency otherwise. Dropbox should be a textbook case for how scrappy startups can compete against the behemoths.

Edit: Dropbox biggest competition seems to be the shift from file systems to apps. A Google acquisition seems most likely. Personally I think Apple should snap them up for deep integration with iTunes/iOS. It could be a perfect marriage, but it doesn't seem like a very Apple thing to do.

View on HN

Google would make it free - but trawl all your data to send you ads.

Apple would make it apple only - which is kind of irrelevent to 99% of people.

Microsoft would just do it sooooo badly.

Well, Apple already has iDisk, which is Mac/iOS only and Microsoft has SkyDrive, which I've heard performs horribly, so it's already happened, except for google.

> except for google

Well, no. You can upload any document you want on google docs now. And they give API to manipulate, there's a company that offers a dropbox like solution based on this. Google it.

Apple's iDisk is not Mac/iOS only. Any WebDAV client can access it. I use it on an XP machine without any extra software. In fact, using an open standard like WebDAV is probably the reason for iDisk's performance issues. Any WebDAV "disk" I have ever connected to has had performance issues.

Microsoft would just do it sooooo badly

they probably have the best and most advanced implementation out there: www.mesh.com

it does exactly what the guy above describes that he wants from Google, except that it is available now and can also be used as a platform for apps

My hope is that if anyone buys Dropbox it's Amazon, and they just let Dropbox continue on its merry way, kicking general ass.

interesting perspective. I agree and disagree. I think Google could over-engineer it, but UI aside, there needs to be some "intense" engineering to scale this reliably across the globe. I don't doubt that Dropbox could do it, but I feel Google is poised for something like this. To their credit, they have gotten a few things right ;)

Isn't Dropbox built on top of Amazon datacenters? If that can't scale, I don't know what can.

Yes - you could regard Dropbox as simply a different pricing model for S3

Amazon, you pay for what you use, Dropbox you pay (more than S3) for 50Gb, you use less than that Dropbox make money from you. They also aggressively hash data chucks to avoid storing the same data from different people twice - while charging both of you.

None of this is bad - they have a great product - but it's how they do it.

Dropbox is so much more than a different pricing model though. i just think of the hundreds of insanely non-technical people i know who say to me "wow, dropbox changed my life". how many non-technical people say that about s3?

Uhm. S3 enabled Dropbox. By definition, it changed the world more than Dropbox.

I don't think so. Bear with me as the analogy is not all the way there, but small nuclear 'pebble' reactors already exist. Not that much people care... BUT the company that makes them available to the masses cheap and safely will change the world.

This is trivially wrong unless somehow you think Dropbox is simply a thin UI layer over S3. Which, if you really do think that, is the type of dismissive attitude that armchair Web 2.0 pundits like to spout off without any clue what goes into building a good user experience.

That makes sense. We should rewrite the history books to reframe everything as the achievements of carbon.

> you could regard Dropbox as simply a different pricing model for S3

I think a better analogy is that you pay more for a simpler and friendlier interface to S3...

Dropbox is one of many "applications built on top of S3/EC2". That's not an analogy, because you really don't need one. S3 is for developers, not users. Users don't care where Dropbox stores its files.

Amen

I wasn't aware of the agressive hashing - interesting. I wonder if they're actually operating at a scale where there'd be a real risk of a hash collision causing data loss for some very confused poor sod.

The Venti archival storage system paper might be an interesting read for you[1]. The researchers deemed Sha1 (160-bit) acceptable to hash 8Kb data blocks for an exabyte of data (10^18 bytes). The risk of collision at that level is less than 10^-20. There are now 512-bit sha hashes, so that takes it to another level.

So, I think Dropbox is safe from hash collision risks at this point.

[1] http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/venti/

I'm pretty sure they added some secondary identity checking mechanism. After hash match, you can compare the first x kbytes of the documents for example.

>They also aggressively hash data chucks to avoid storing the same data from different people twice

If one user uploads a large movie and another goes to upload the same large movie, is the upload nearly instant then as a result? Do they sha1 the file, decide it is the same, and then just make an association that this file is now used by two users?

Yes - at least when I upload identical large data chunks on different machines the second one finishes instantly. It also means moves and renames of files in the dropbox folder are instant

When I left, it had been in development for 5 years. Definitely looked for an over-engineered solution that is pushed out in some desperation to ship something.

I am happy to have my files by an independent(!) Dropbox. But if... please not apple! not Facebook! and not MSFT! which gives...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com