Dropbox Leases Giant New SF Office, Plans To Grow To 400+ Employees • Hacker News Board

Re: Dropbox Leases Giant New SF Office, Plans To Grow To 400+ Employees

#61

Post by sliverstorm » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 6:48 AM UTC

rednaught wrote: post #25

qq66 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Client-side encryption severely worsens the economics of Dropbox, and not everyone needs it. If you want that you're perfectly entitled to go build your own competitor, which will have higher costs.

It's already been built such as Spideroak and Wuala. Dropbox could capture more of the market and even concerned businesses if they make this even as much as a simple configurable option. If the data deduplication costs higher because of client-side encryption, then charge me the commodity price of storage for that option. Not everyone needs it but some do...

How do you propose they pay for the development? I personally doubt they will suddenly have businesses with deep pockets knocking on their door with fistfuls of money.

Re: Dropbox Leases Giant New SF Office, Plans To Grow To 400+ Employees

#62

Post by kooshball » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 7:39 AM UTC

MikeCapone wrote: post #9

Maybe I'm just an ignorant not-involved-in-a-startup person, but what is Dropbox doing with these 400+ employees? To me Dropbox seems like it's a pretty simply and mature product feature-wise. Have they announced that they're expanding into other products? I just hope they won't bloat Dropbox the way that some of these one-main-feature softwares were inflated in the past (ICQ, etc). edit: I guess what got me thinking…

> Google had a working search engine and they were building their own hardware with less than 100 employees. Just not sure what Dropbox can do with 400+ since their product is a lot simpler and they're not dealing with datacenters

I wouldn't be surprised if part of the 400 people will be for building our their own storage system. I'm willing to bet most of their operating cost is storage and I believe they currently use S3 which is very expensive. Unless they can get some great prices from Amazon, they will certainly at some point build their own storage system in order to scale up.

Re: Dropbox Leases Giant New SF Office, Plans To Grow To 400+ Employees

#63

Post by bane » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 12:19 PM UTC

slug wrote: post #59

bane wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One easy thing they could do is put a folder in everybody's dropboxes called "my website" or something, where people can simply start dropping files in and have db basically "just work" as a site publisher. I know it sort of does this now, but I've heard many problems about it when the traffic starts to scale. Presumably you'd need some serious engineers talent to solve that issue. Imagine no more fussing with ftp cl…

Wouldn't it be possible to do this with webdav ? RW+ permissions for you, R for world.

Yeah, basically webDAV, but integrated into Dropbox.

Re: Dropbox Leases Giant New SF Office, Plans To Grow To 400+ Employees

#64

Post by vogonj » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 4:23 PM UTC

funkah wrote: post #11

mtogo wrote: post #2

In related news, Dropbox employees were surprised to find that the new building's locks could be opened with any key and that despite the landlord's Terms of Service, janitors and other building staff can in fact open and view private containers and documents belonging to employees.

That's a great point, Dropbox totally had a security bug that one time.

the security bug was a lack of authentication that rendered Dropbox nearly useless for its core purpose of securely storing files, that got pushed to production and _stayed there for multiple hours_.

giving Dropbox some guff for it is completely reasonable.